The Chancellor claimed in his budget speech this week that austerity is ending, yet our local councils continue to face tens of millions of pounds of cuts over the next four years; 1.4 million adults who need social care are receiving no support at all; our schools are cutting teacher and teaching assistant posts; police numbers are falling while crime is going up; and our local hospital remains in financial special measures being penalised by the government for not having sufficient funding. The Tories have outsourced austerity to local government and our public services and our communities are living with the consequences every single day.

On 21 March I travelled to the former Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp in Poland with the Holocaust Education Trust and a group of young people from Dulwich and West Norwood and South London.

I learned about the Holocaust as a teenager at school in the North-West of England, every year in January I commemorate Holocaust Memorial Day, and I have met and spoken to a number of Holocaust survivors. Yet nothing quite prepared me for visiting Auschwitz-Birkenau. The museum which has been created at the sites of the two camps which formed Auschwitz-Birkenau communicates very powerfully the horrific scale of the mass persecution and killing which took place there, but the displays of personal belongings stolen from the prisoners – a handmade child’s dress, a decorated cup and bowl, thousands of pairs of shoes – also remind us that each and every person who was murdered by the Nazis was an individual with their own story, their loved ones, their talents, their struggles and their hopes.

I recently led a debate in Parliament on Dulwich Hamlet Football Club. The club was locked out of its Champion Hill ground last month by its landlord Meadow Residential LLP.

I have received countless emails, letters and messages from my constituents who are deeply concerned about the Dulwich Hamlet FC’s future. DHFC has deep roots in our community and it is loved for its charitable and community work as much as for the inclusive approach to football, family atmosphere at its home games and its recent strong performance in the Bostik League. I was delighted to join around a thousand fans at the protest and rally the day after the debate support of the club.

In Parliament I asked the Sports Minister to join me in calling on Meadow to re-engage with the Council and the club, and to negotiate a way forward which places a secure future for Dulwich Hamlet Football Club at its historic home Champion Hill as its highest priority. The situation at Dulwich Hamlet has implications for non-league and league football in communities across the country. 

I have been fighting Royal Mail’s proposed closure of the SE27 delivery office in West Norwood and SE22 delivery office in East Dulwich since these plans first came to light.  The plans would see residents in SE27 having to travel to Penge to collect parcels and registered post on a journey which can take up to an hour in each direction, and residents in SE22 having to travel to Peckham to an area with no on-street parking.

I’ve tabled an Early Day Motion in Parliament to highlight the pressures faced by mental health services in my constituency and across South London. Despite the Government’s tough talk on mental health, the reality is that under the Tories half of all Clinical Commission Groups say they plan to reduce the proportion of their budget spent on mental health.

My Early Day Motion calls on the Government to review current NHS spending standards for mental health and to ensure future funding for mental health is properly ring-fenced.

It’s great to have support for the EDM from MPs across South London. I will continue to press for mental health services to be properly resourced and to receive the priority that they deserve.  You can read my EDM here: http://www.parliament.uk/edm/2017-19/895

Yesterday I led a debate in Parliament on the financial pressures at King’s College Hospital.

I gave birth to my two children at King’s and my mum worked there for ten years until she retired. The situation at King’s is as personal and as important to me and my family as it is to tens of thousands of my constituents, and it is very concerning to see the current financial difficulties the Trust is facing.

King’s has been on a journey over the past twenty years. Back in 1998, when I was an in-patient, it was a struggling, failing hospital. Years of investment under the last Labour government transformed King’s so that by 2010 it was meeting all of its main clinical targets and consistently achieving a small annual financial surplus.

The Boundary Commission for England has recently published its latest set of proposals for new constituency boundaries, for consultation.  The proposals are based the requirement to reduce the number of Parliamentary constituencies from 650 to 600, an initiative of the Coalition government, in order to reduce the costs of our democracy.  

At a time when the UK population is increasing, I believe that this reduction is profoundly undemocratic, and that cost savings should be achieved by reforming the House of Lords into a modern, democratically elected Chamber, with fewer than the current 800 Peers.  The current Boundary Commission proposals would split Dulwich and West Norwood constituency into four different new constituencies, and I believe that this would be very damaging for our communities.  I have set out the reasons for this in my response to the Boundary Commission consultation, the full text of which is pasted below.

The Chancellor delivered a Budget last week which exposed the extent to which Theresa May’s Tory government is mired in its own divisions, unable to articulate a vision for the country, negotiate Brexit effectively, deliver a strong economy or invest in our public services.

Before delivering his announcements, the Chancellor set out an extraordinarily weak context – our economy is flat lining, and wages stagnating, underpinned by poor productivity.  Theresa May fought the general election in June based on the promise of a strong economy.  She has abjectly failed to deliver it.