Sarah Owen, Labour prospective parliamentary candidate for Hastings and Rye.

Sarah Owen invites Hastings to share her aims

Following on from a recent article when the Conservative candidate outlined three priorities for Hastings, Sarah Owen, Labour’s candidate for MP in Hastings and Rye, has responded to HOT’s invitation to set out her three top priorities for our town in her own words, writes Chris Cormack.

“Hastings is a beautiful seaside town that has so much to offer. It would be easy to name my top three priorities as decent transport, better education and more jobs, which we all know any successful town needs, but having grown up here my vision for my hometown is much bigger than this.

These three priorities are at the heart of why I am standing for MP in 2015.

Priority 1 – Getting the basics right

Improving transport and infrastructure is a given – obviously we want better trains, better roads, and better broadband, but that shouldn’t be the end of our want; that should be just the beginning.

Priority 2 – High quality, well paid jobs

Of course I want to improve our employment rates in the town, but this isn’t just about jobs – it’s about high quality jobs. When you ask people what Hastings is famous for, often they will mention Harold, the arrow in his eye, and 1066, but what they should be saying is “highly skilled manufacturing industries, creative technical engineering industries”, because that’s what we actually do, we’re just not famous for it – yet! This is where I see our decent, high paid jobs coming from in the future.

Priority 3 – A more ambitious vision for Hastings and Rye

We cannot carry on as a low wage economy, where around £10 an hour is the average wage (well below the national average). Our aspirations for Hastings should be for much more than just a town that can function well. We should be looking to be World leaders, with our local skilled manufacturing and renewables linking up with education, first rate research and design and local apprenticeships. This is why I took our message out to China recently. They are the global industry leaders in terms of highly skilled manufacturing and technological advances, and they found that Hastings has a lot to offer.

Where we are in terms of research and development should be attracting the brightest and best from universities across the country – there is so much potential for them to come to Hastings and play their part on a global stage, not only in high vacuum technology, but also in areas such as tidal wave technology, which has just come to one of our local industrial estates.

So yes, it’s about more jobs, better education and improved transport and infrastructure, but we limit the potential of this fantastic town if we don’t see beyond these to a better vision of what Hastings can and should be. I’m not someone who just talks up our Hastings, I celebrate its achievements and I genuinely love living here in my home town.”

Saving Our Maternity Services

Sarah's maternity services campaign.

Sarah has launched a new campaign to ensure that maternity services stay in Hastings. East Sussex Hospitals NHS Trust, which runs both the Conquest Hospital and Eastbourne DGH, is currently consulting on six options for maternity services in our area. None of these options include a consultant-led maternity unit at both hospitals, three of the options downgrade maternity services at the Conquest Hospital and one option has neither a consultant nor midwife-led service at our local hospital.

Sarah believes our hospitals need excellent quality consultant-led maternity services in place. Join the campaign to stop the downgrade of maternity services in our local hospital. You can support the campaign and sign the petition online.

Amber Rudd invites Hastings to share her aims

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