The Conservative Hornchurch and Upminster Prospective Parliamentary Candidate Julia Lopez today writes for the Havering Daily.
Since 2017, I have served as your MP with pride and dedication, and as the Conservative candidate at this General Election I would love the chance to continue that service and roll out the ambitions we have for our constituency and our country in the years ahead.
One of my priorities these past two years has been to increase the profile of Hornchurch & Upminster in Westminster and bring more Cabinet Ministers to Havering to ensure residents get the resource they deserve. This has led to tangible outcomes – from the £17 million we secured for a new health centre in Hornchurch and cash to improve our junctions, roads and river crossings, to the extra money secured for the Met and the new nursery places, capital investment and special needs funding that we won for our schools and Havering Sixth Form College.
I have shared progress on these campaigns through my regular media columns and written too about the range of community events and groups we have established to benefit residents and local businesses such as our Older People’s Fair and the Trade Hub at Queen’s Theatre for companies looking to export. We have also undertaken campaigns and petitions to keep open local police stations and Post Offices, and to secure step-free access to our stations.
I have set up a new local office to provide residents with a responsive and efficient service from me as their MP. To this end, my fantastic team have helped over 3500 individual constituents with their cases and enquiries, we have visited forty local schools and colleges and undertaken countless visits to businesses and community groups across the constituency.
My primary role, however, has been to act as your voice in parliament and I have helped bring in tougher powers to fight knife crime and terrorism and taken a range of local issues to national level such as the campaign to improve children’s cancer treatment and secure new treatments for cystic fibrosis sufferers.
If re-elected I want to see us finally bring Brexit to a successful conclusion and put the appalling division and behaviour in the last House of Commons firmly behind us. This country is fizzing with creativity and talent, and it is time we unleashed it and started focusing on the issues that matter most in people’s everyday lives.
In the coming years, we want to be fully-engaged with the design of the St George’s Health and Well Being Hub in Hornchurch to make Havering a nationwide success story in integrated health and social care. I want to continue the work I have started against youth violence and social deprivation by rolling out new partnerships between schools, emergency services and community organisations like the West Ham United Foundation. I want to introduce new events like our Jobs Fair and roll out our new work experience and debating competitions to get school children engaged with our democratic system from an early age. And I want to use my experience as a very new mum to look at whether maternity, childcare and pre-school services are working as they should.
With my experience on the International Trade Committee, I also want to play an active role in building an exciting new path for Britain after Brexit, linking up new transport infrastructure with expanding ports in the Thames Gateway region, and reforming our education and skills systems so that we have a dynamic, globally-competitive workforce.
I would welcome the support of Hornchurch & Upminster once again on 12 December so that I can continue to secure further positive breakthroughs for the residents that I have been honoured these past two years to serve.