Dear Editor,

BACK when I used to work for an MP, we learned to work by a useful rule – don’t comment on how great the Budget is for 24 hours. That’s usually how long it took for the government spin to wear off, and for the think tanks and interest groups to pore over the fine print and pick out all the ugly details.

As with most good life lessons, this was learned the hard way! For example, it is so much easier to keep the popular local family-run pie maker on board when you haven’t already gone on record about how brilliant the Pasty Tax budget was – a proposal that was quickly dropped after a ferocious backlash.

Having called this year’s budget “a miracle” Mr Vince is, I imagine, currently learning much the same lesson we did. There’s plenty of farming families in the north of the newly expanded Harlow & the Villages constituency who will be thinking about what miracle they’ll have to pull if Labour’s proposed changes to agricultural property relief come in.

Meanwhile, Harlow’s businesses small and large will be thinking much the same about the hike to employer’s national insurance – a £25 billion tax burden that will ultimately be paid for by lower wages, fewer jobs and lead to slower economic growth.

Having had to defend taking the winter fuel allowance away from 11,000 of Harlow’s pensioners, it would be nice for our new MP to have something good to bring back from Westminster. After all, his Conservative predecessor delivered freezes to fuel duty, tens of millions in investment for our town, and securing the commitment to fund the new hospital we need.

It is that new hospital that is my own focus. Having been appointed earlier this year to take a lead on the Council’s planning and on the Garden Town project, seeing the incoming government double down on the new housing our country undoubtably needs, whilst failing to commit to the new hospital that must go with it, has been unnerving. The consequences for places like Harlow if we get the new housing but not the extra infrastructure would be a disaster.

Many readers will have followed this closely for years and be familiar with the vision, which Harlow Council committed itself to when under Labour control back in 2020. Lots of new housing is to be built all around Harlow, to be offset by a brand-new hospital near the new junction 7a (itself built ahead of time to accommodate extra traffic).

Indeed, the plan is even more ambitious than that. Princess Alexandra Hospital would not just be relocated but would become part of a “new state-of-the-art public health science campus”. In the week we’re told Harlow is already the best tech hub in the whole country (we are officially #betterthanBracknell), the inveterate cynics who tend to comment under these posts may want to pause and recognise that after decades of decline, there’s a lot of good things going on in Harlow now.

Being so well-connected to London, Cambridge, Stansted and to the M11, there’s an exceptionally strong case for backing this plan and making the vision of Harlow as a health, science and technology capital a reality.

That’s why Labour reviewing the plan for the new hospital is so frustrating, and short sighted. In the moment we need to know the government of the day gets it, gets what Harlow can become, they are busy finding ways to penny-pinch on major schemes, even whilst massively raising tax and borrowing. If you want sustainable economic growth, you do need to invest in places like Harlow, not just foist huge house-building schemes on them.

In fairness to the new MP, it is still early days. Health Secretary Wes Streeting, after talking a genuinely good game on reforming the NHS whilst in opposition, appears to still be working out how to actually deliver on that in office, beyond the need for lots more money and fewer fax machines. That would explain his ‘ask the audience’ style consultation.

Maybe, just maybe, the time for our MP to tell him there’s already a solid plan to improve health outcomes in Harlow and the large catchment the Princess Alexandra serves, is not yet at hand. Then again, we’re not far off being a tenth of the way through this Parliament, and landslides these days aren’t what they used to be, especially for tin-eared governments that don’t deliver on what they say they will.

How much longer is this review of the new hospital everyone agrees we need, that had government funding in place prior to the election and that the new Labour MP promised to deliver, going to take?

One of my other lessons learned from working in Westminster is that whatever the can, there’s always plenty of long grass to kick it into. The longer Harlow’s new hospital remains under review, the clearer it is that it won’t be delivered under this government and under this MP.

At a time when local authorities like Harlow are bracing to be told we need to find even more places to build new housing, on top of the huge increases we’ve already been committed to (voted for by Chris Vince no less, when he was a Councillor), last week’s Budget was a missed opportunity to show that this Labour government understands what it will take to make Harlow not just bigger, but better.

Let’s hope it gets its act together urgently, for Harlow’s sake.

Yours sincerely,

Cllr Alastair Gunn