Outlined here are the key policies that The Green Party offer Fareham. These have been built up by our members following the amazing amount of responses we’ve had from residents in our community. We’d like to thank the residents of Fareham for their overwhelmingly positive support for our canvassing, campaign literature and our overall work for the Fareham area.
For too long people have not been listened to. Fareham has been one shade of the Westminster spectrum and no one else has offered any sense of hope or change. Green spaces have been built on, damaging the character of our area. Public Transport has been cut beyond the bone, leaving retired and young people stranded and businesses in Fareham and Whiteley concerned for their future. People across our entire borough are finding it ever more difficult to seek an appointment with their GP, or they are having to find a different surgery to go to because the one they’ve used all their lives has been shut. This is not acceptable, which is why the Green Party are offering an alternative for our community.
You can read the Green Party’s 2017 Green Guarantee here.
Transport
The Green Party has heard, over the last few local elections, that many residents are incredibly frustrated at the lack of decent transport available to them. The Green Party would therefore:
- Re-regulate the bus industry, with the aim that local authorities ensure that public transport is designed and planned to create a user-friendly service, that is reliable, affordable, accessible, integrated with all other sustainable modes and environmentally friendly. Public service, not private profit, must be the primary function of public transport.
- Renationalise our railways for similar reasons stated above. The fiasco around Southern Rail is evidence that Privatisation fails Fareham.
Education
The Green Party believes that the cuts imposed on education by this government have hindered and caused an immense amount of damage to the young people in our society. We believe:
- Privatisation of further education should be stopped, these are places of education not profit.
- That Educational Maintenance Allowance (EMA) should be reinstated for 16 & 17 year olds.
- Tuition Fees must be scrapped.
- Student Grants (for Higher Education) should be reintroduced to help students pay for living costs.
- Academies and Free Schools should be brought back into the control of local authorities.
Health
Our National Health Service has been decimated by this government through back-door privatisation and catastrophic cuts. Here is what the Green Party would do:
- We would Repeal the Health and Social Care Act 2012 and introduce a NHS Reinstatement Bill.
- Stop further Private Finance Initiatives (PFI)
- We would provide local community health centres that provide a large variety of services, including out-of-hours care.
- We would also ensure that mental health is considered as much a priority as physical health. Young People are increasingly suffering from mental health problems and they need to be looked after as they go through education and work.
“I am a huge supporter of the NHS, before I joined the Green Party and found my “roots” (if you’ll pardon the pun), I campaigned for the National Health Action Party in the Eastleigh By-Election alongside them. It was only after I had looked at the other policies of The Green Party that I realised they were my kind of politics! I would definitely, without question, vote against private companies taking control of services provided by the NHS. I would also go one step further and vote against TTIP in it’s entirety – even if it did exclude the health service, for too long public services that have been built up by the taxpayer has been sold off to private corporations that have still taken our money through subsidies for half the job!
I would also vote to fund the NHS so that all services were up to scratch, I would also make sure that with that funding comes more hospitals, more doctors and nurses, bring back matrons, more research, I would even go so far as to argue for a Nationalised Pharmaceutical Company – where we take the profit motive out of drug research, we could find cures to diseases a bit quicker. I believe that at the moment the NHS is lacking basic-joined up thinking, recently I attended a mental health conference by the Wessex Parity and there was quite a lot of issues around co-ordination of schemes and ideas that were costing more money than needed and at the same time the competition between hospitals and other services were causing unprecedented stress on the healthcare staff that already have a tough enough job as it is with healthcare cuts!”
Housing
In Fareham, wherever there is an open space the likelihood is that it’ll be turned into housing. Even the Warsash Maritime Academy is at risk of being turned into housing. We need to protect our green spaces. The Green Party recognises a need for housing however developments need to be sustainable and to be built on Brownfield sites.
- Developments should be built on brownfield sites that aren’t of historical, cultural or social importance.
- Any consultation process should be done pro-actively to ensure for maximum representation of the local population.
- Welborne is bad for Fareham and South Hampshire. Not just Environmentally damaging but socially and economically too.
- Across our country it is estimated that there are 700,000 empty properties that are just sitting there. We should do more to make sure these are utilised to fulfil our needs.
- Fareham Borough Council should cease it’s co-operation with Partnership for Urban South Hampshire (PUSH). Urbanisation is unsustainable and damaging to our environment and the character of our communities.
For more Green Policies, please visit here. If you have any questions about policies please email me and I will try and get back to you within 48 hours.
