Luke Myer MP sat down with the Local Democracy Reporting Service for a conversation about his first six months in the job and what the future holds.
Mr Myer is the MP for Middlesbrough South and East Cleveland, having been elected with one of the slimmest majorities in the whole of the country. He beat incumbent Conservative MP Sir Simon Clarke to the job by just 214 votes, the fourteenth narrowest majority in the whole of the UK and the tightest in the North East of England.
The first six months
The Labour government, elected on July 4, 2024, has now been in power for just over half a year. Mr Myer was asked how the first six months of being an MP had been for him. “Incredibly busy, my focus is on being a constituency MP, so I’ve been as active as I can here”, he explained. “We’ve done 27 surgeries so far, spoken to over a thousand residents, the casework for me is the heart and soul of the job, and that’s been incredibly busy, but it’s a fantastic opportunity to be able to help people.”
He explained how he had grown up in Brotton and the constituency’s MP at the time had been Ashok Kumar. Mr Myer described Mr Kumar as “the model” of what a good MP is like. “He was never interested in becoming a minister, or a Secretary of State… he just wanted to serve the community and he did it tenaciously, diligently and that’s what I want to emulate really. If I can do half the job he did, I’ll do well.”
When asked directly if he had ambitions of becoming a minister, he said: “No I don’t, I’m just not interested in that, I live here, I love it here, and this is what it’s about. And whether I’m here for 10 minutes or 10 years, I just want to make the biggest difference I can for people in our area.”
Mr Myer was asked what he thought of the Labour government’s first six months in power, particularly the negativity that has been associated with the government. “Yes, we’ve taken some really unpopular decisions but we’ve done that deliberately, because the state that our country is in is really serious, whether it’s our economy, whether it’s our public services, everything has been run into the ground.
“Do we chase after popularity, and tell everyone what they want to hear? Or do we take the big, difficult decisions that may not be popular, but are necessary to get our country back on track?” He added: “There’s been lots of really positive stuff that’s happened as well. We’re ramming through legislation at a rate of knots.”
The Labour MP went on to list some legislation including the Employment Rights Bill, describing it as the “biggest uplift in workers rights in a generation”. On the positives, he said: “I think that maybe we need to shout about it a bit more. We’re deliberately not wanting to say that everything’s fantastic, because the country is in a difficult state.”
Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill
When listing what he saw as the positives that had occurred on Labour’s watch, he mentioned the ongoing Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill, highlighting the free breakfast clubs. This bill has received more attention than it likely otherwise would have, as a result of the Conservative amendment which called for a national inquiry into grooming gangs. Mr Myer, who voted against the amendment, describing it as a “political trick”, asserted that the way the amendment was written “would have blocked a really important piece of child protection legislation”.
He outlined his view that the grooming gangs scandals “is one of the most horrific scandals in the country’s history. The abuse that the victims suffered is vile and all the perpetrators need to face justice”.
As he did not back the amendment, he was asked what is the route that should be taken instead. “I think we need to deliver on all of the recommendations of the IICSA [Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse] report, this was a major, landmark, national inquiry, seven years of work, £186m spent, two million pages of evidence and none of the recommendations have been acted on. So we need to deliver on all of those,” he explained. Mr Myer also confirmed he had no problem with the discussion of “further inquiries”.
On the commonly-made critique of the schools bill that it would lower standards, Mr Myer spoke about his time as a teacher and in the education sector. He added: “Boosting teachers’ pay is a really important step that we’ve taken as a government. I want to see proper SEND reform as well, but I don’t have any truck with this idea that by supporting state schools, you’re running down the standards.”
Poverty and jobs
During his time on Redcar and Cleveland Council, Mr Myer served as the cabinet member for children and had a child poverty strategy. He was asked about child poverty in the region and the differing approaches of regional mayors Kim McGuinness and Ben Houchen were discussed.
“I completely agree that we need high quality, well paid jobs in our region, that is fundamental and that has been, probably the biggest issue that I’ve been working on as an MP since being elected. Green jobs for Teesside” such as carbon capture and storage.
However, “it shouldn’t be a conflict between working to create jobs and working to tackle child poverty, it’s not an either or, and I think what Kim McGuinness is showing is that we can do both. She’s working on industrial strategy and jobs, she’s also working on child poverty, embedding welfare advisers in schools” and “supporting families that are on the breadline”.
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