A pledge to carry on fighting for a better deal for the area

Published on 07/01/2013 07:00

BEING Ponteland’s local MP is a real honour. I couldn’t do it without you, and I don’t just mean your vote.

As we head into the New Year, it reminds me of all of the things we have been able to achieve together.

When I took on the energy companies over the rocketing price of energy and heating oil, local people Mike and Lauren came down to Westminster to help me give evidence. When I challenged the county council over its unfair treatment of its women workers, local constituents turned out to pack a public meeting I organised.

When I took on the campaign to protect our green belt, thousands of you got behind it and signed my petition.

But, as well as our work locally, I want to mention what I’ve been doing in Westminster too.

I have been the first to stand up to the Government when I think it is wrong.

On issues like selling off our forests, regional pay and fuel duty, and many others, I have always put local people first. But I also feel I have helped deliver some really positive things for our area too.

We have cut the deficit by a quarter, introduced a benefits cap so no household receives more in benefits than the average family earns, helped almost 500,000 more people into work than this time last year, cut the income tax bills of more than 24 million workers, cut net migration by a quarter, protected the NHS budget, brought in the biggest-ever cash increase in the state pension, froze fuel duty, helped freeze council tax bills for the third year in a row and cut billions of pounds of Whitehall waste.

There is so much more to do, and next year I will keep on fighting for a better deal for our area.

Community

Looking for...

Featured advertisers

Jobs

Search for a job

Motors

Search for a car

Make Model Price from Price to

Property

Search for a house

Buy Rent

Bedrooms Price from Price from Price to Price to

What is a Cookie?
What is a Flash Cookie?
Can I opt out of receiving Cookies?
About our Cookies

Cookies are small data files which are sent to your browser (Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome etc) from a website you visit. They are stored on your electronic device.
This is a type of cookie which is collected by Adobe Flash media player (it is also called a Local Shared Object) - a piece of software you may already have on your electronic device to help you watch online videos and listen to podcasts.
Yes there are a number of options available, you can set your browser either to reject all cookies, to allow only "trusted" sites to set them, or to only accept them from the site you are currently on.

However, please note - if you block/delete all cookies, some features of our websites, such as remembering your login details, or the site branding for your local newspaper may not function as a result.
The types of cookies we, our ad network and technology partners use are listed below:
- Revenue Science ►
  
  A tool used by some of our advertisers to target adverts to you based on pages you have visited in the past. To opt out of this type of targeting you can visit the 'Your Online Choices' website by clicking here.
- Google Ads ►
  
  Our sites contain advertising from Google; these use cookies to ensure you get adverts relevant to you. You can tailor the type of ads you receive by visiting here or to opt out of this type of targeting you can visit the 'Your Online Choices' website by clicking here.
- Webtrends / Google Analytics ►
  
  This is used to help us identify unique visitors to our websites. This data is anonymous and we cannot use this to uniquely identify individuals and their usage of the sites.
- Dart for Publishers ►
  
  This comes from our ad serving technology and is used to track how many times you have seen a particular ad on our sites, so that you don't just see one advert but an even spread. This information is not used by us for any other type of audience recording or monitoring.
- ComScore ►
  
  ComScore monitor and externally verify our site traffic data for use within the advertising industry. Any data collected is anonymous statistical data and cannot be traced back to an individual.
- Local Targeting ►
  
  Our Classified websites (Photos, Motors, Jobs and Property Today) use cookies to ensure you get the correct local newspaper branding and content when you visit them. These cookies store no personally identifiable information.
- Grapeshot ►
  
  We use Grapeshot as a contextual targeting technology, allowing us to create custom groups of stories outside out of our usual site navigation. Grapeshot stores the categories of story you have been exposed to. Their privacy policy and opt out option can be accessed here.
- Subscriptions Online ►
  
  Our partner for Newspaper subscriptions online stores data from the forms you complete in these to increase the usability of the site and enhance user experience.
- Add This ►
  
  Add This provides the social networking widget found in many of our pages. This widget gives you the tools to bookmark our websites, blog, share, tweet and email our content to a friend.
- 3rd Party Cookies ►
  
  We use Advertising agencies to provide us with some of the advertising on our websites. These include (but are not limited to) Specific Media, The Rubicon Project, AdJug, AdConion, Context Web. Please click on the provider name to visit their opt-out page.

A pledge to carry on fighting for a better deal for the area

Top stories

Community