Hello everyone,

We’ve had a lot of things going on in Parliament over the last couple of weeks – votes on Post Office closures, and debates on Policing in London, to name just a couple.  It’s been busy locally too, with boat race weekend starting tomorrow.  Read on for more of an update.

 Post Office Closures

There are just few days left to respond to the public consultation on shutting our local post offices – it finishes on 2^nd April, though I’ve written to both the Post Office and John Hutton (Secretary of State) to ask for the consultation to be extended a further 6 weeks.  Last week, we finally had a debate on the post office closure programme in Parliament.  I was able to make some points about our closure programme locally and MPs from all sides of the House talked about the problems we’ve all seen with the closure programme.  However, critically we lost the vote to put the closure programme on hold by just 20 votes – we just needed 11 Labour MPs to change their vote, including the Labour MPs in Battersea and Tooting who voted to continue with the closure programmes in their community.  Make sure you have your say, and even after the consultation, I’ll be working to keep both our post offices under threat open.

 

Heathrow Update

This week, I finally won my battle to get more information out of Ministers on the impact of Heathrow.  The papers I’ve been given show that BAA did so much of the work that at one point the DfT complained they were not being kept informed about what was happening!  They also show that we may well have the larger planes coming over our area, to try and “spread” the pollution more evenly across the airport.  It’s a real disgrace.  None of this was put in the public consultation document and I’ll be doing my best to put all of the issues the FOI papers show into the public domain.  This week, The Economist said that a third runway and 6^th terminal are not the answer, and have quoted the work I’ve been doing to make our case locally.  http://www.economist.com/displaystory.cfm?story_id=10923778 Gradually, I believe our community is winning the argument, but we have a long way to go.

District Line Problems

Recently, the District Line service has really been poor – slow service, delays and earlier this week, I went onto Southfields Station to get into work – walked past a board at the front of the station saying there were delays, only to be told by tannoy that there was “a good service”.  It wasn’t a good service.  I raised a number of issues we have locally recently in Parliament when we debated problems with Metronet and the London Underground work. I use the service every day to get into work and the MP Textline people are using is very helpful to let me know how the poor service affects people directly.

Dangerous Dogs

Following several nasty attacks on residents and their own pets by dangerous dogs, I’ve been following up with the Minister Jonathan Shaw to see whether we can strengthen existing laws to make it easier to take action against people who own dogs that they cannot, or will not, control.  I’ve now had a response back from the Minister saying that he thinks its more of a case of enforcing existing legislation.  It’s disappointing because the government held one of its many reviews into this very area, and officials from Wandsworth Borough Council were involved, alongside the Kennel Club, and other stakeholders.  My understanding is that the review group also made some constructive recommendations about strengthening the law, but these have now been set aside by Ministers because there isn’t enough time to take any changes through Parliament.  Even so, I’m going to continue pushing to see if we can somehow find some way of getting these issues tackled.

Don’t forget, if you need my help as MP, I have a weekly MP surgery or you can email me on greeningj@parliament.uk or write to me at the House of Commons, London, SW1A 0AA.  I’ll do my best to help!

Best wishes

 

Justine Greening MP

March 31, 2008