This week’s Cost of a Child 2025 report from the Child Poverty Action Group (CPAG) makes for grim but essential reading. It confirms what is already clear to us in Blackpool – families are being priced out of a basic standard of living and government policy is making it worse.

In my first year as your MP I’ve visited nearly every school across Blackpool South and one issue has come up more than any other – support for children with special educational needs and disabilities, or SEND.

One of the best outcomes of my Beyond the Prom tour this summer was working with Enveco, our local environmental team. We spotted problems from fly tipping to dog fouling and overgrown weeds and they cleared them.

The new NHS Online Hospital will let you be referred straight from your GP into a national online system. That means you can see a specialist online within days, not months.

I’ve joined other Labour MPs from coastal towns to demand action from the government. We want a proper plan to bring good jobs and opportunity back to places like Blackpool.

This week in Parliament, I called on the Communities Minister to make sure the full £1.5 million Pride in Place Impact Fund for Blackpool is spent in South Shore.

I’ve long said that Blackpool has the answers to its own problems and when MPs from the Health and Social Care Committee came to Blackpool this summer, I was proud to demonstrate to them exactly what I mean. What they found, in fact, were perhaps answers to the whole country’s problems – at least when it comes to the first 1,000 days of life.

The government has launched a four-week review of outdated pub licensing rules that are holding our town back. And I want you to have your say.

Thanks to new package of measures including tax-free training incentives worth up to £31,000, the Labour government will recruit and retain great teachers where they’re needed most – including right here in Blackpool.

In Blackpool we see the impact of addiction, mental ill health and homelessness every day. Too many people are stuck in a cycle they can’t break on their own and this new funding will go straight into treatment and recovery services that help people turn their lives around.

I’m calling on business owners here in Blackpool to share what’s really happening on the ground and what more we can do to fix this. Your experience matters and your views will help shape what happens next.

This week the Chancellor, Rachel Reeves, confirmed that every state primary school in England will have a library by the end of this Parliament. Labour will provide libraries to the 1,700 schools currently without one. The funding comes from £132.5 million unlocked from Dormant Assets.

Labour has fired the starting gun on a major set of plans to open up opportunities for young people, with announcements that will change lives right here in Blackpool.

No more drilling and disruption on the Fylde Coast. It’s over for good.

The Pride in Place programme is the biggest shift of power from Westminster to towns like ours in history. Layton and Grange Park are set to receive £20 million of long-term investment – guaranteed funding over the next decade. On top of that, Blackpool has been awarded £1.5 million in Impact Fund money for immediate improvements to shared spaces, high streets and the public realm.

For too long local government has been overlooked and underfunded. Decisions that should be made close to the people they affect have instead been handed down from Whitehall. Blackpool South, and Lancashire as a whole, has felt this deeply. This English Devolution and Community Empowerment Bill begins to put that right.

Are you a teacher in Blackpool South? Would you like to be better equipped to teach your pupils about UK Parliament? Apply for an all expenses paid course in Westminster and find out how.

My magazine, Beyond the Prom, is dropping through doors across Blackpool South as I speak. Read it in full here!