Prime Minister Boris Johnson spent Bank Holiday Monday visiting Hartlepool Nuclear power station where he spoke about his party being ‘fanatically focused’ on the levelling-up agenda.
With council elections due to take place later this week (Thursday 5th May), the Prime Minister said that voters should ‘focus on what the Conservatives are doing to transform people’s opportunities.’
The Prime Minister said:
“In the last year you have seen GE come in with their turbines investment on Teesside, the development of the Teesside Free Port site, the British Volt plant at Blyth, Saudi Arabia has invested £1 billion in the hydrogen sector, and you’ve got the Nissan development of the Envision plant in Sunderland.
“You can see investment coming in to the North East, hand over fist, and it’s really fantastic to see it.
“In terms of Thursday’s elections, I really think people should focus in what we’re doing to transform people’s opportunities here in the North East.”
The Prime Minister said getting more police officers on the street, improving internet connectivity and infrastructure investment were also all big Conservative priorities, adding:
“Conservative-run councils fill in four times as many potholes and take out bins twice as fast.”
“Conservatives deliver the lowest possible council tax with the best possible services.”
Acknowledging the hardship many are facing due to rising living costs, the Prime Minister said the answer was more high wage jobs and helping people into work:
“And we are looking at ways that we can keep people’s bills low for the foreseeable future, to get people over this immediate hump, which I appreciate is tough.
“But the way to deal with that is to help people with their bills now in the way that we are with the £150 reduction in their energy bills, plus all the other support for energy, Warm Homes grants and so on and support for local council to help families who need it.
“But the really important thing to do is to invest now for the medium and long-term and make sure that we don’t have to rely on inter-connectors from France for our energy.
“We should have our own nuclear energy, we should have much more offshore wind and that is what we are doing.”
Mr Johnson said it was ‘very likely’ that Hartlepool could be a location for one of eight new UK reactors following the announcement in early April that the government wants to almost triple the country’s nuclear power generation capacity.
“We are the only government, I think, in modern times that is actually fanatically focussed on delivering a levelling-up agenda.
“For me this is an incredibly exciting time because some of the things we believed in and thought were worth trying are starting to work.”
While in Hartlepool, the Prime Minister also met with Richard Lee, father of toddler Katrice Lee, who in 1981 disappeared from a British military base in Germany.
The toddler was last seen in Paderborn, West Germany over 40 years ago. Her whereabouts still remains a mystery.
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