Frank's Westminster Blog

I have had the privilege of representing Birkenhead since 1979.  During most of this time I have dealtwith a broken backed Council. There were reasons for this.  Shortly before I was selected the local authorities had been pushed together into ‘the Wirral’. The wounds were there for everyone to see. The crisis in the Council came to a head long before theColas whistleblowers called time.  The council would have had to considered how it...

The Centre for Social Justice report on worklessness makes appalling reading.  In some areas of our town over half of the populationbetween the ages of 16 and 64 depend on out-of-work benefits.  If this is not a wake-up call for the national political parties I don't know what it is. Since the 1960s politicians have seen the solution to unemployment as increased training.  It hasn't worked. The lack of skills is important in understanding...

Last Friday I paid another visit to Wirral’s foodbank, which is run by the Tussell Trust. Here's my second report on their fantastic progress. I hope the words ‘fantastic progress’ jar. They are meant to. 120 volunteers who run this extraordinary project met together after helping to feed the thousand families coming for help. Any sense of celebration was overcome by the awesome feeling of what their work meant. How can one be celebrating feeding...

Large numbers of young people leave school and enter unemployment.  It is as ntrue in Birkenhead as it is in the rest of the country.  So what are we going to do about it?   Studies on where children end up in life show that probably at the age of 3 years, and certainly by the age of 5, it is possible to predict (on average) which children will have jobs; which children will fly; which ones will struggle; and even the ones likely to go to prison. So...