Candidate Interview: Debbie Abrahams (Labour, Colne Valley)

Debbie Abrahams, the Labour candidate for Colne Valley, at her campaign office in Slaithwaite today. (That's my baby daughter's head at the bottom right of the picture!)

Labour’s general election candidate for Colne Valley has said health, the economy, jobs, education and the environment are the five issues she’s focusing on in her campaign. Debbie Abrahams also used an interview with Saddleworth News today to say that “fairness and social justice” were her key themes across all policy areas.

On the NHS she praised her party’s efforts in government since 1997, saying that “huge strides” had been made on waiting times in particular. But Mrs Abrahams conceded there was more work to do, adding that she’d like to see a particular focus on “the quality as well as the timeliness of our care.”

Mrs Abrahams said that one her main roles if elected would be to help small businesses in villages and towns across the Colne Valley and Holme Valley. She said Labour had committed the state-owned banks to lend £95bn to small businesses, and she described this pledge as an “absolute certainty.”

On the environment, Mrs Abrahams said she wanted to be “fully engaged” in future consultations about local planning matters and building on the green belt. She said she believed there were enough brown field sites locally to satisfy development needs, and that she wanted to protect green belt land, adding that Labour had doubled the amount of UK land designated as green belt since 1997.

Mrs Abrahams described the price of travelling by train from Slaithwaite and Marsden ‘across the border’ to Greenfield and into Manchester as “quite unacceptable.” She said that, if she’s elected, she would hope to “facilitate some dialogue” between the Greater Manchester and West Yorkshire transport bodies to try to find what she called a “rational” solution.

Mrs Abrahams comes from a background in health, and she’s currently the director of a public health research unit at the University of Liverpool. I interviewed her earlier today at her campaign office in Slaithwaite. We also discussed housing, as well as the issues of trust in politics and MPs’ expenses.

You can listen to the interview in full by downloading it from here.

As with many of these interviews my daughter was with me, and plenty of gurgling and other baby noises can be heard on the recording. As you can see from the photo above, she ended the interview on Debbie’s knee!

My interview with the Green candidate Chas Ball is here, you can hear from the Conservative Jason McCartney here, and the UKIP candidate Melanie Roberts here.

Also standing are the BNP’s Barry Fowler, Jackie Grunsell of the Trade Union and Socialist Coalition, and the Liberal Democrat candidate Nicola Turner.