Thank you very much, Madam Deputy Speaker. It is a genuine honour to rise to give my first speech and to speak for the first time representing my 91,555 electors. Rising for the first time gives me the opportunity to congratulate you and welcome you to your Chair. It also gives me the opportunity to follow in the tradition of paying tribute to my predecessor. My predecessor was Mark Lancaster MP, who was well respected across the House. He entered Parliament in 2005 as the MP for Milton Keynes North East. Throughout that time, he was a colonel in the Territorial Army, and he still is today. He saw action in Kosovo, Bosnia and Afghanistan.
Mark also had a distinguished ministerial career. As a Defence Minister, he rolled out the armed forces covenant and was instrumental in the modernising defence review. In our constituency, his work was very much appreciated, particularly his work on categorising the drug khat as a category C narcotic. His work was welcomed and he is remembered fondly by our communities in the constituency. I asked around for amusing—and shareable—anecdotes about Mark and I received a lot of responses, none of which hit both of those categories. Suffice it to say that he was an excellent MP and an excellent Minister, and that he remains an officer and a gentleman.
My right hon. Friend the Member for Haltemprice and Howden (Mr Davis), who is no longer in the Chamber, mentioned the golden triangle of growth and opportunity that comes up from London to Oxford and Cambridge. Of course, the middle bit of the north side of that triangle is Milton Keynes, which I represent along with my hon. Friend the Member for Milton Keynes South (Iain Stewart). Milton Keynes is a wonderful place. Its economy is worth £12 billion a year to the Exchequer, and it is one of the most productive places outside London. One third of the employees work in knowledge-intensive industries, and it is one of the fastest growing places not only in the UK but in Europe. For that reason, Milton Keynes will play a significant and important role in the UK’s post-Brexit industrial strategy and in our place in the world.
The maiden speech made by my hon. Friend the Member for Wantage (David Johnston) was a tour de force. In fact it was a tour de Didcot. I am not going to give the House a tour of Milton Keynes, because there is plenty to do, but if Members were to take a tour of Milton Keynes, it would probably take them about 10 minutes by car. As my wife says, everything is 10 minutes away in Milton Keynes. It is a very functional city.
Mine is a constituency of three parts. There is the city itself—home of the concrete cows, of course—then there is the rural bit, at the northern end of my constituency. As a lad, my first job was sweeping yards on farms and driving tractors in fields whose produce was destined to be exported through the ports mentioned by my hon. Friend the Member for Ipswich (Tom Hunt) as part of Britain’s contribution to the world. That part of the constituency is incredibly important to me. The third bit is what I call the frontier of Milton Keynes, and I will get to that in a second.
The city of Milton Keynes is the No. 1 destination for business and finance investment outside of London. It is a hub for finance, tech, innovation and industry, as evidenced by the recent opening of Santander’s tech innovation hub, which is worth 6,000 jobs in the constituency.
There is much more to Milton Keynes than business and finance, however. People can shop, ski, dine and drink. In Milton Keynes, our groceries are delivered by robots, and our cycleways are shared with driverless car pods. We are a city that is going places. Our city boasts more waterways than Venice and green spaces that are 10 times the size of Hyde Park and, of course, it is home to the Concrete Cow Brewery—I can recommend the MK IPA.
The rural north of the constituency is geographically the most substantial part of the constituency. It features well-run, well-managed, environmentally sustainable farms that not only contribute to our nation’s food supply, but husband the countryside. It has wonderful villages—vibrant, lively communities—and two beautiful market towns. The market town of Olney is slightly older than Milton Keynes—only a thousand years or so—and the market town of Newport Pagnell, where I spent a considerable amount of time talking to people during the election campaign, is beautiful in a way that only those of us born in market towns can describe. There is something special about market towns, but it is difficult to convey. I spent a lot of time talking to people in Newport Pagnell and, although I did not agree with everybody on matters of policy and politics, we all agreed that
Newport Pagnell should remain a market town and not become a suburb of a wider urban metropolis. It is important to retain that character.
That brings me to the third segment of the Milton Keynes North constituency that I mentioned: the frontier. This is the bit of Milton Keynes that is so new that we are still building it. It is a wonderful place. It is a great place to live, work, bring up a family, and grow a business, but we are suffering from reckless over-expansion. Thousands of houses are being bolted on to the side of Milton Keynes. The city, of course, is famous for its grid system and its roundabouts, but the roads are clogging up due to those thousands of new houses on the edge of Milton Keynes. We need our growth to be sustainable, appropriate, affordable and proportionate, and I will strongly champion that, not only for Milton Keynes but for many other places.
Of course, like any other town, Milton Keynes has issues such as knife crime. It is devastating and heartbreaking when a young life is extinguished by a blade, and we need to sort this situation. The extra 20,000 police officers will definitely make a difference, and 183 of them are already in recruitment for our local force. They will be complemented by a further 69 uniformed police officers and 140 extra back-office staff to do intelligence gathering, and that really is the key. We need to re-task our police to get tougher on the postcode gangs and to break up the scourge on society that is knife crime.
We also have an issue with homelessness, and my first constituency meeting as the MP for Milton Keynes North was with the Milton Keynes Homelessness Partnership. It does fantastic work and I am sure that it, like me, welcomes this week’s announcement of an extra £700,000 from the Government for Milton Keynes to support our fight against homelessness. Interestingly, my meeting with the partnership was set up by a man called Festus Akinbusoye. Festus is a board member of the YMCA. He is also a self-made man and an adviser to me and other MPs on issues such as community safety and knife crime. Festus was previously a resident of the YMCA in Milton Keynes. Nearly two decades ago, when he had nothing but a roof over his head, the YMCA allowed him to get his life together and make a success of himself. He is now a self-made man, he is an adviser to MPs, and I am very proud to say that he is also chairman of the Milton Keynes Conservative federation.
Milton Keynes, like the Conservative party, is a place of opportunity. These opportunities come from our companies such as Aston Martin, and William Cowley, which makes the vellum upon which the laws we make in this place are inscribed. Then there are the new technology companies like Starship Technologies, which makes those robots that deliver groceries. There are plenty of catapult companies working in artificial intelligence and driverless cars, and, of course, Milton Keynes is home to the most electric car charging points of any UK town or city.
We have 14 outstanding primary schools in the constituency and many wonderful secondary schools, at which it was a pleasure to speak during the campaign. With the schools, with the people, with the entrepreneurial spirit and with the right kind of investment in sustainable, affordable, appropriate growth, the second part of Milton Keynes’s first century can be even better than the first.
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