It is an honour to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Davies. I am incredibly grateful to my hon. Friend the Member for Waveney (Peter Aldous) for securing this great debate. He is a great champion of levelling up the east and I thank him very much.
As was mentioned, it is just a year since our last debate on levelling up the east of England. I am happy to say that my local authority has been successful in its bid to receive £20 million for the much-needed rejuvenation of Clacton town centre. It was a fantastic result and I want to thank the Minister. One does not always anticipate a great phone call, but it was a great one to receive. I also want to thank the leader of Tendring District Council, Neil Stock, the chief executive officer, Ian Davidson, and all the other officers who backed them to achieve that result.
We mentioned Jaywick earlier. Seventy years ago today, 37 people lost their lives in that very small village, of the 307 across the east of England. Although the local council is making great efforts to improve that particular area with flood-proof homes and building a brand new market area, it is still served by one very poor road. It is one of the areas in my constituency that needs investment.
We are not an urban city down in Clacton, like Chelmsford or Colchester. We are multiple communities spread across a rural landscape. We have two railway lines that come into Walton and Clacton, with an hourly service that takes 90 minutes to cover the 69 miles to reach London. I have always said that is not acceptable in this day and age. It is certainly not appealing to commuters and is a great barrier to levelling up my patch. There is the unfair and flippant view, about which we heard earlier from my hon. Friend the Member for Waveney, that the east of England is just universally wealthy. We know that it is not. Try telling that to pockets of my constituency, which have deprivation issues that outstrip anywhere in Scotland or Wales. That is just a fact.
The roads are a core part of that and some are in a very poor state. They are the only way to get from one end of my constituency to the other. If we throw in some roadworks, which we recently had in Kirby Cross, it is somehow quicker to get to London than it is to cross the 14 miles of my constituency. That is ridiculous. We must invest in my constituency’s roads, which means affordable homes and sustainable jobs, if they can be built in the right places. We currently lag behind urban neighbours. We talk about how future rail such as High Speed 2 will change the world. What about the old-fashioned, crumbling roads that are holding back areas such as Clacton?
The east of England has been granted a fantastic and brilliant opportunity with Freeport East. That will help enormously with the global powerhouse that my hon. Friend the Member for Waveney mentioned earlier. It will create jobs and provide long-term income for the
area. We need to utilise it, and I can think of no better way than by investing in transport infrastructure, so jobs in the freeport can be accessed from areas such as Jaywick, which is the most deprived ward in the country. This is our opportunity not to gloss over the situation. It is a better chance than any for the Government to show their long-term ambitions for levelling up and really improve the lives of my constituents. My plea to the Minister is that she should not think the job is done following the latest round of investment. Instead, I urge her to work with colleagues in the Department for Transport and the Department for Work and Pensions, to maximise the benefits of levelling up in tucked-away coastal communities such as mine in Clacton.
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