MidSussex Crawley Horsham

I am the after-school club manager at St Mark’s school, Staplefield and I also work as a classroom assistant in Burgess Hill whilst studying to qualify as a teacher with a BA Honours in Primary Education. I have a big interest and investment in education and making sure schools give children the best start in life. Back in 2019, OFSTED reported that the WSCC child services had ‘widespread and serious weaknesses’. They also said that the quality of care from WSCC was ‘a lottery depending on where you lived’ and so rated the service as INADEQUATE. The commissioners report for the DfE said that there had been ‘inadequate and ineffective’ leadership of children’s services in West Sussex for many years. East Sussex County Council were then drafted in to help improve the running of this service. West Sussex County Council was shown to have missed signs of neglect leading to consequences for some children and their families. Although a new report in 2020 said that the service had improved there is still much work to do to bring it up to the quality that children and their families in West Sussex deserve. We need to make sure that services for our children and young people are properly funded and given the right level of support especially at a time where children’s social development has been so profoundly affected by the pandemic - trapped indoors doing home learning. Parent’s and children’s mental health have suffered and we need to make sure we are doing all we can to help, support, and give our young people their best chance of success.

After its short and ineffective life, the Green Homes Grant has joined many other half-baked, central government, consultant run, initiatives in the great policy graveyard in the sky. At a stroke, withdrawing this plan halves government support for carbon reduction in dwellings from £2.5bn to £1.3bn, with the only bright side being that the remaining money (up from £1bn previously) will be administered by local authorities focussing on low income households.

Is this a strategic move to ditch a widely criticised mess, so that the PM can introduce yet another “world beating path to the sunny uplands” closer to the COP26 date? Alok Sharma MP (President of the UN COP26) has a task on his hands to make this look like good governance.

One little irony here is that some of the 25 to 30 million UK dwellings that need Green Homes improvement would not have needed it if the same central government had not relaxed new building regulations in 2015 when they scrapped the Code for Sustainable Homes. That code proposed new builds from 2016 to be close to zero carbon ('Code 0'), but some of the big housebuilders (eg Persimmon) claimed it was too difficult/expensive... How much more expensive (to build)? About 8% more should get you a Passivhaus, which would be close to Code 0.