My Priorities as WMCA Metro Mayor
Economic Growth
- Provide incentives for investment in innovation, research and development
- Concentrate WMCA policies on supporting small and medium sized businesses
- Use the WMCA and Metro Mayor role to help SMEs gain access to the funds they need to expand and grow
- ‘Post Brexit’ : favour UK companies in contract provision (banned under EU law)
- ‘Post Brexit’ : push for the removal of growth-restricting, largely EU-generated red tape
- Ensure our communities and businesses are at the forefront of the Government’s high-speed fibre broadband rollout program
Transport
- Prioritise improvements providing greatest benefits to local businesses
- Provide much more accurate information about planned roadworks/upgrades, and make it readily available to everyone
- Work with Highways England to improve the quality/timeliness of information on signs across the West Mids road network.
- Review and adopt measures improving traffic flow across our towns and cities
- Investigate reopening Worcester to Derby (via Black Country) railway line, reintroducing passengers onto the Camp Hill line
- Continue to oppose the ‘London commuter belt extension’ (HS2), there are better ways to spend £90bn.
- Perform feasibility study into upgrading paths and tow paths on our waterways to provide an extension to cycle networks
Housing
- Focus on identifying and refurbishing empty houses
- Focus on converting empty shops and offices into affordable housing
- Incentivise preparation and use of brownfield sites, protect our green belt
- End large scale relocation of families from other parts of UK to West Mids
Skills
- Champion the introduction of greater flexibility in our education system
- Enable transfer to grammar schools for children between 11 and 13 yrs
- Identify and ensure that our colleges provide courses in the key skills local employers need, in particular by increasing vocational training options
Mental Health
- Ensure Mental Health provision given equal priority and status to Physical
- Ensure ‘ringfenced’ funding for Mental Health becomes truly ringfenced
Homelessness
- Provide help needed to those on streets due to mental illness/drug dependency
- Provide help back into society for those who have simply ‘fallen on hard times’
- Support police in removing & prosecuting those who are ‘professional beggars’
Transparency
- Ensure WMCA & Metro Mayor activities visible to the public, no secret meetings
- Ensure honesty, openness & transparency are at the heart of ‘everything WMCA’
Europe
- Highlight and mitigate against the threat from the EU’s Europe 2020 – Eurocities program which may will continue well beyond Brexit, with significant economic and operational implications for the WMCA
NHS, Social Care, Dementia
- I passionately believe the NHS should be in public ownership. Not only would I oppose any further privatisation, I would lobby for our
local hospitals, some of which are forfeiting up to 10% of their annual budget in PFI repayments, to be bought out of these terrible deals.
These crippling debts (entered into largely under the most recent Labour government) are simply unsustainable.
I am firmly opposed to Hospital Car park fees, which are effectively ‘a tax on the sick, and their friends and relatives’. - I support the merging of NHS and Social Care into a single entity.
- As mayor I would support the Alzheimer’s Society mission statement, and make every effort towards achieving this:
“By 2020, the West Midlands will be seen as a leading Combined Authority for people affected by dementia; a region where every person affected by dementia – no matter who they are or where they live – can live well and access the right support, at the right time, in the right way”
UKIP is the party which believes in small and medium sized businesses. I will seek to maximize opportunities for our local businesses to thrive and grow, and work tirelessly to establish and maintain the West Midlands region as an extremely attractive option for investors around the world.
Pete Durnell 