Dear John,

This week Parliament reopened with the Queen’s speech following a brief pause for local elections. However, I was disappointed with the lack of action by this Government on tackling crime.  
 
Since 2019 crime is up 18% and prosecutions are down 18%. People are fed up with no action being taken on crime. The charge rate is now a record low and hundreds of thousands more criminals are getting away with their crimes. 
 
93% of reported robberies, 95% of violent offences, 96% of thefts, 97% of sex offences, 98% of reported rapes, over 99% of fraud have not seen charges within a year, let alone prosecutions. 
 
Under a Labour Government, we will set up Neighbourhood Crime Prevention teams & Police Hubs, bringing back neighbourhood policing into our towns & cracking down on crime from violence against women to drug dealing gangs to antisocial behaviour blighting our communities.  
 
And, that is exactly what I am fighting for across our constituency covering Edgbaston, Harborne, Quinton and Bartley Green. Have your say and complete my consultation on where police hubs should be located in each ward of our constituency. 

This week the Government stopped providing funding to NHS hospitals which had been in place during the pandemic, for the suspension of parking charges. In response, the University Hospitals Birmingham NHS Trust (UHB) announced this week that it would be asking staff to pay a fee to park at work. I strongly believe that it’s not right that staff should be made to pay to park during a cost-of-living crisis when they are already having to shell out more for petrol in order to get to work. 
 
The fact trusts are having to rely on cash from hard-up staff to top up their finances showed the NHS wasn't being properly funded and this is yet another disgraceful policy from this Conservative Government who are out of ideas on how to support residents through the cost-of-living crisis and fund our vital frontline public services.  
 
My calls for the Government to reverse this decision have been backed by the local Royal College of Nursing (RCN) branch and a number of unions. We must see NHS staff treated fairly and our services properly funded. 
 
We went into the pandemic with an NHS already on its knees: with 17,000 fewer NHS beds, 100,000 full-time NHS staff vacancies, hospitals crumbling, public health services cut, GP numbers down so the NHS is in crisis not simply because of Covid. The NHS is in crisis because of the Conservatives. 
 
Your next Labour Government will: 
 
1) Invest in quality healthcare with the staff, modern equipment and technology needed to bring waiting times down and we’ll confront the shocking health inequalities that leave those who are poorest, more likely to be less healthy, more likely to die sooner and were the most badly affected by Covid. 
2) Fix social care so that those who need it aren’t going without care. We’ll do this through ensuring that more people can access care and ensuring that people can live in their homes for longer, supported by carers paid the real living wage of £10 an hour they deserve. 
3) Guarantee mental health treatment within a month for all who need it, see a radical expansion of the mental health workforce, resulting in over a million more people receiving support each year, alongside unprecedented investment in children’s mental health after the disruption of the pandemic. 
4) Will deliver the biggest children’s health and wellbeing programme ever seen - supporting children through every stage of their development, whether physical or mental. 

The scale of plastic waste across the country and in our constituency is still largely unknown. To combat this gap in our knowledge, Greenpeace and Everyday Plastic have launched the nation’s biggest investigation into household plastic waste with a campaign called ‘The Big Plastic Count’.  
 
I have signed up to the count which will start on Monday. I am now calling on everyone across our constituency to join me so that together we can better understand how much plastic is actually being recycled. From this, we will be able to challenge the Government, supermarkets and other big brands to take ambitious action on plastic packaging.