Other policies

Community and wellbeing

It is very easy to focus on negatives, and to assume that as long as nothing specific is going wrong, everything must be well. But we also need to focus on the positives of life, and try to enable people to be actively happy and fulfilled - living somewhere they like, near people they like, doing jobs they like, having hobbies they like.

One way of enabling this is to provide community facilities, which provide opportunities for people to engage with each other and with local activities. Similarly, voluntary organisations can play a large role. Julian has just celebrated the opening of a new community centre in his ward, for which he has campaigned since his first election to the council.

Health

The Labour government has provided a large increase in the money available for healthcare, but this has not all lead to improvements in service for those who need support; far too much money has been sucked into a target-driven bureaucracy. As an ambulance technician with St John Ambulance, I saw first-hand some of the undesired consequences of the four-hour A&E waiting target, with patients being dealt with inappropriately, or even left too long in the ambulance to avoid the clock starting. Huge amounts of money have also been wasted on schemes such as the huge NHS IT project, now being finally abandoned, and constant reorganisation of the administration, as PCTs and other bodies come and go.

Now that the economy has collapsed, the amount of funding available for healthcare is being severely cut back. NHS Cambridgeshire has recently announced that it expect to have to cut back spending by about £100 million per year, about 10% of its current expenditure. This will mean, for example, fewer operations at Addenbrooke's

More help needed for Mental Health

Mental Health provision has sadly not seen as much support as other aspects of healthcare, and has long been a Cinderella service. This is particularly short-sighted, as while money is saved, the additional costs incurred in other areas of the public sector, together with reduced employment prospects, massively outweighs the savings.  Cuts here in Cambridge in the Young People's Psychiatric Service are an excellent example of how saving a small amount of money leads to overall a greater cost in both financial and human terms.

HIV and sexual health

Increasingly, support is required from charitable organisations. I was recently had a long discussion with the Chair of Cambridge-based DHIVERSE, one of the UK's oldest HIV organisations. They provide a wide range of services across the range of sexual health as well as providing detailed support in all ways to HIV-positive patients. Sadly, their funding is now threatened as they rely on relatively short-term grants. 

Older People

 As people age and retire, they have a right to live their lives out with dignity and a good quality of life. We must make sure that pensioners receive decent amounts of money, without having to fill in highly complicated forms, which deter many from applying, and without running the risk of missing out altogether through the technicalities of National Insurance contributions.

And when people do become unable to look after themselves, we must allow them to maintain their dignity as much as possible, by providing the support they need. This means providing free care for the elderly, rather than the crudity of means-testing. We should also do what we can to promote early intervention to deal with problems, rather than just waiting for things to get worse. Where possible, we should enable people to live in their own homes, by providing support where necessary. I used to be a volunteer at Arthur Rank House in Brookfields Hospital, principally helping to provide entertainment and variety to the patients there, so have seen first-hand the limitation of what can be done even in the best care homes.

Younger people

How we treat young people now determines how they will treat others in the future, and the opportunities we give them now will determine what they will be able to achieve in later life and give back to society. However, the government, aided by the media, seems determined to demonise young people, viewing them as a problem to solve. One parish council in Huntingdon, where I stood in the 2005 general election, even renamed its Youth Panel as the 'Anti-social Behavior Panel'.

I believe that we must provide activities for young people to do, and have campaigned for many years on the County Council for increased funding of Youth Services, currently abysmally poor. In my own ward he has managed to get a new community centre built, including a large dedicated area for young people. I have also worked with the police to provide positive engagement with young people - and the police started sponsoring the local youth football club. This approach is surely much better than criminalising young people