For this week’s general election, OTS News invited all six Southport parliamentary candidates to interview. Patrick Hurley, Sean Halsall, and Edwin Black were interviewed in person. Damien Moore and Erin Harvey agreed to recorded interviews, but due to internal constraints, these were conducted in writing. Reform UK’s Andrew Lynn declined to participate.
OTS News: Patrick Hurley, thank you very much for joining us. You are Labour’s candidate for the Southport parliamentary seat. And you may know that seat was formed 139 years ago. Labour has stood 24 times for the seat, and they have never won. Why are you going to be Labour’s first Southport MP?
Well… the first ever Labour MP for Southport… it’s been a long time coming. I think we can see in Southport, the impact of not having a Labour MP and the impact of having a Conservative MP and a Conservative government. We’ve had 14 years of Tory decline across Southport and the whole country. And the town centre has seen better days. We need a Labour MP who will work with the Labour Council and the Labour government and Labour colleagues across the Northwest to make sure that we get the investment that Southport needs and that Southport residents deserve.
OTS News: It’s really interesting you mention the Town Centre. Just this morning, I got a leaflet of yours pushed through my letterbox. And let me quote from it, it says, “I’ll campaign to bring business back to high street and our work to improve the look and feel of Southport Town centre to make sure our best days lie ahead of us. Can I push you into a bit into a bit more detail on how you plan to do that? How does it work? You’re essentially trying to bring rents down and make commercial enterprises more viable? When people talk about Lord Street the big thing that they mention is empty shops and things like that. How would you plan to go about fixing that?
Okay, so nationally, we’re proposing to abolish business rates completely. Businesses need to be taxed, but they need to be taxed in a much more efficient and equitable fashion. A lot of bricks and mortar retail just can’t compete with online at the minute. And that’s not necessarily because of the structure of online delivery and the way people shop these days. It’s because the tax regime in the UK hasn’t kept up and got to grips with the changing nature of the economy. If you look at other countries across the world, we see that they have changed their tax regimes, and that they’re not suffering the same impact of the high streets in the town centres that the UK has. So what we’re saying is that we’re going to abolish business rates and ensure that small business owners and retailers have a fair crack at the whip and a fair chance of making their businesses successful. The other things that I want to see happen in Southport you know, town centres aren’t just about retail anymore, they’re not just about going down on a Saturday afternoon and browsing the shoe shops or going into a cafe bar or whatever it would be. There has to be a mix of residential going in there. And what I want to see is, a lot of the unused buildings being turned into either residential properties, or some innovative uses. We’re seeing in the Wayfarers Arcade. There’s a unit at the back turned into the Engine Room, which is now this really innovative tech-based and grassroots-led initiative, which points to the direction where Southport should be. This what I’m gonna say isn’t national party policy, but it is something that I’m hoping to hoping to promote if I am a backbench MP after the election. I wrote last year to Michael Gove as the Secretary of State. And I said, look, if you’re very keen on things like enterprise zones and investment zones, why don’t we pursue a policy or why don’t you pursue a policy of refurbishment zones so that within a specific geographical area, you can equalise the tax treatments between new builds and refurbishing and renovating properties. I got the letter back say it’s not the government policy. And it’s one of the things that I want to see happen in the next parliament and given the chance I’ll be looking to see if I can promote that. Refurbishment zone would essentially mean that the incentives for property developers to build new out of town stores are reversed because right now we’ve seen with Sainsbury’s, they’ve got a shop on Lord street but they’ve just opened on the Kew retail park. And the reason they’ve opened up on the Kew retail park, and the reason that Pure Gym have opened there and that Tesco is there… the reason that not in the town centre is because their accountants take one look at the balance sheet and they say: “Oh, if we built from new on a retail park we would be zero-rated for VAT, but if we refurbish a building in the centre of town on Lord Street or on Chapel Street, we have to pay the contractors 20% VAT charge. So I would say why can’t we, within geographical areas, have refurbishment zones that equalise that discrepancy? So we are no longer incentivizing property developers and retailers to build out of town. Instead we’re incentivizing them to refurbish the lovely Victorian buildings and the heritage we’ve got and get people back into the town centre.
OTS News: In contrast to that, Southport is an expanding town with a growing population We are short of services and businesses on the outer edges of the town. Are they not just as important? Do we not need to prioritise them as well?
Patrick Hurley: Well the major impact or the major thing that we need to change in Southport is we need to make sure that people’s bank balances are healthier, we need to put more money into people’s pockets. Now, it doesn’t really make a difference to people’s bank balances where the shop is located or where they work. It means that we what we need to do is revitalise the economy, get the town going again, make sure that our best days lie ahead of us as a town and as a local area. It seems nonsense to me why we would want to leave buildings empty in the centre of town and build from new out on the outskirts. If we’re going to build from new.. then let’s build houses. Let’s build community infrastructure. Let’s build schools and GP practices and dentists practices. You know, let’s build pubs… But we’ve got buildings in the centre of town that are going begging. And there’s a whole range of reasons for that. But one of the things I do want to see is all of those buildings or as many as possible, being brought back into productive use. I’ve nothing against a good greasy spoon cafe. I like a full English. But when I walk down Chapel Street and Cambridge Arcade, I don’t want to see the old BHS and the department stores being turned into greasy spoon cafes and mobile phone repair shops. There’s a place for that, but it isn’t on the corner of Chapel Street and Cambridge Arcade.
OTS News: If you are elected, you talked about what would happen if you become a backbench MP for the Labour Party that does look set to become the controlling governing party. How would you reconcile the balance between following the party whip and representing constituents if you’re given different instructions?
Yeah, I don’t believe there’s really a discrepancy here because I fully expect that the party whip is just.. it’s just the collective decisions of the Labour Party. And what we want to achieve as a Labour Party is more investment in towns like Southport across the country. Not just in Southport, but in Preston in Wigan, (where my wife’s from) in Bolton, in Prescot where I’m from, we need to invest in these towns and I fully expect that every single Labour MP with a vested interest in seeing their own local areas invested in will to vote for the things that will make Southport a better town to live and work in. One of the things that’s key to this is making sure that councils, local authorities receive a fair funding settlement. A lot of people say to me that Sefton Council doesn’t invest in Southport – it invests in Bootle instead, and we get this argument and the put to us on the doorstep when I’m campaigning, and they say “the money goes to different parts of the of the borough”. The problem is that I go and campaign for candidates and colleagues in Ormskirk, and people in Ormskirk say that the money goes to Skelmersdale. People in Prescot say the money goes to Kirkby, and people in Leigh say the money goes to Wigan. The truth of the matter is that the money has been sucked out of all of these towns and places over the years. Sefton Council’s budget in 2024. is about a quarter of a billion pounds a year less than it was in 2010. Not even accounting for inflation just in in real figures. With those sorts of quotes, no private sector organisation could withstand quarter of a billion pound cut per year and still manage to keep the show on the road. And it’s testament and credit to local authorities that they’ve done that under such trying circumstances, and we need to invest in councils, we need to invest in local areas. And I fully expect that if I’m given the honour of representing Southport in the next parliament, that when we’re being told that the budget is a whipped piece of legislation that within that budget, our areas of interest for Southport on our investment proposals for the local area.
OTS News: You’ve mentioned Sefton Council there, and you’re clearly going to get challenged and asked about Sefton Council’s record in relation to Southport. I was reading the Labour manifesto the other day and Labour have adopted this sort of slogan unofficially “stop the chaos”. It appears over 30 times in the manifesto in relation to Conservative governance of the country. But when you look at Labour’s record locally, in Southport, you’ve got controversial cycle lanes, you’ve got children’s social care has been slammed across the board. Liverpool City Council, you were a councillor there that was taken over and has government oversight because of the issues that were found. One could point to Labour locally and say there are still a lot of problems. So I’d be interested in your take on the current situation with Sefton Council.
I’ll resist the opportunity to make a party political points here because the issue cuts across parties. Town halls across the country and local authorities across the country, no matter which political party run them, have faced (and are still facing) unprecedented financial challenges. You know, cities like Birmingham are going bust which 10 or 15 years ago would be unthinkable. Every time that you’re looking, you open a paper or you get a notification on your news app on your phone, you’re seeing that local authorities are cutting services and dealing with the impact of central government decisions. Now how that manifests itself will change local authority by local authority, it will change area by area. So in Liverpool, there was an issue where they brought in commissioners to oversee the governance and that’s happened now. That’s in the past. They’ve moved out of that process. In Birmingham, they issued the notice to say that they couldn’t make ends meet, that their in-year budget wasn’t sufficient to fund all of their statutory services. In other parts of the country, we’re seeing libraries cut to the bone, we’re seeing leisure centres closed down. We’re seeing youth clubs and children’s services and Adult Social Care being cut year after year after year. So how these things manifest themselves changes area by area – but the fundamental cause and the one thing they’ve all got in common is the decision taken year in year out since 2010. Each and every budget to cut local authority funding. “you mentioned the “stop the chaos” slogan, and I’m not sure…?
OTS News: The only reason I mention it.. I was reading the the Labour manifesto. And it appeared prominently as a sort of unofficial slogan and yet Labour’s detractors or people who would vote against you… I would contest that they can look at Sefton’s record, they can look slightly down south to Liverpool, and they can find examples of poor governments at the hands of the Labour Party. And I think my question was wanting to explore what your reaction to that would be.
Okay, so there are two things around stopping the chaos. Firstly, when we were in government last time as a Labour Party, in … I think it was in 2007, Gordon Brown was the Chancellor at the time, and he announced the 2p cut to income tax. And he announced the 2p cut to income tax to take effect from 13 months after the announcement. And the reason he did that is to provide stability to small businesses so that they weren’t facing in year different differentials on whether or not they could pay more people or that they knew where the investment might go. And there was that stability to say in “13 months time your payroll is going to change. You may be able to employ more people, you may be able to say that the 12 months that you’ve planned for.. plan in 30 months time for different things to come down the track from central government. And what we’ve seen over the last 12 months, well over the last however many years, are multiple fiscal events per year, where they have a budget in March, another budget in September, and a mini-budget in October. Businesses can’t keep up. There’s lack of stability. This is the chaos. This is what Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng were doing, and at the start of this year, Jeremy Hunt randomly announced a 2p cut in national insurance to take effect immediately. This is a pre-election gambit that takes no account of the fact that small businesses have to scramble to catch up afterward. As regards the local authorities. This is one of the reasons I put my name forward to leave local authority politics behind and go into national politics if the people of Southport will have me. It’s because during COVID and in the immediate aftermath, I felt that the decisions I was taking myself… I was taking with one or two hands tied behind my back. The funding that was coming down from government and Robert Jenrick was the Secretary of State at the time, was coming from government with such tight restrictions and ring fenced responsibilities that I couldn’t make the decisions that my local area needed as a councillor. So there’s one example, we got funding to say that certain types of business in certain sectors could receive COVID grants. But we didn’t have many of those types of businesses. So when I said to my officers in the council, can we use this grant money to help out the small retailers? The answer comes back “no”, because the Minister Robert Jenrick has stipulated it can’t be used for that purpose. This is the chaos that I want to end. And this is why, irrespective of which political party controls any local authority, they are all facing the same issues.
OTS News: There’s just one final question I want to ask you. We’ve already a little bit over what we’re expecting. But I think there’s a really interesting, one final question. And I, I was hesitant to even ask this. But I’m going to do so because I think all of your opposition candidates have made this an issue. I’ve not seen a single leaflet or a single social media post that… many of your opposition candidates that haven’t mentioned the local Labour candidate has been parachuted in. There are other candidates here who have stronger links to the town than you that I don’t think that’s unfair to say what I wanted to give you the opportunity to address those criticisms. Given in that respect, why would you be the best person to represent Southport?
This is nonsense. I’ve known Southport and the local area all my life. I’m only from Prescot, which is only about 16 or 17 miles away. My in-laws only live a few miles away in Ormskirk, for pity’s sake. Southport Labour members chose me over all the other candidates available to them because they recognise that I can do a good job of work for the people of the constituency. I’m confident that the residents of the town and villages of the new constituency will respect that I’m here by choice rather than through birth.
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