General election: Fylde candidates make sewage, substations and farming their top priorities

Asked at hustings event what was the first thing they would “specifically do for the Fylde that is not about towing the party line”, several of the candidates turned their attention to waste discharges into the area’s coastal waters.

Anne Aitken, standing as independent, said she was “absolutely incensed that untreated sewage is going into our seas”.

“We’re a tourist area, our rivers are full – it’s just disastrous.   I’m absolutely adamant that we have to do something about the sewage spills.

“At the moment, I am [working] in partnership with the council and we are testing the seas – we do that once a week and we’re going to just see how bad it is and then hopefully we can all work together,” Ms. Aitken said.

Labour candidate Tom Calver said that in terms of “sheer urgency” the main issue that he would want to deal with would be the controversial plans for the ‘Morgan and Morecambe’ cabling and substation development in the Fylde countryside to facilitate a new offshore windfarm, which had been extensively discussed earlier in the debate.

However, he also agreed with Anne Aitken’s concerns over sewage – but said it would not require him to break any party line.

“The Labour Party has a plan for sewage.  It’s about automatic fines for water companies, installing independent monitoring so that water companies can’t get away with misreporting the spills that they’re committing.

“It’s about ensuring that water company executives don’t take home whacking great bonuses while fouling our seas, our beaches, our waters – and it’s about going for criminal prosecutions if people don’t get the message from all that,” Mr. Calver said.

Stressing that he would be attempting actually to “answer the question”, Conservative candidate Andrew Snowden said he had “great concern” about the future of farming in Fylde.

“There are too many central directives…around subsidies for rewilding land, allowing farms to be broken up into smallholdings, around development onto farmland. If you took farmers out of our countryside, it would not be the beautiful, well-maintained and glorious place that it is.

“I don’t think we do enough to support our farmers and the countryside. Something that I will campaign on heavily is that we have a complete readdressing of the subsidy system that is perversely paying farmers not to produce food – it is wrong [and] is against our food security as a country,” Mr. Snowden said.

Liberal Democrat candidate Mark Jewell also said the Morgan and Morecambe energy plans would be at the top of his in tray – but he, too, brought the discussion back to what he described as “the sewage scandal”.

“Our beaches along the Fylde have been rated as poor.  The Liberal Democrats would make our water companies a public benefit company and [as for] the regulator, we would just scrap Ofwat and introduce a clean water authority that had real teeth in keeping our waters clean.

“We would also ban [bonuses] for those bosses who don’t deliver,” Mr. Jewell added.

Three other candidates standing for election in Fylde were unable to attend the hustings – staged by the Local Democracy Reporting Service, Blackpool Gazette, Lancashire Post, Lancashire Lead and Blog Preston – and sent their apologies – Cheryl Morrison (Alliance for Democracy and Freedom), Brenden Wilkinson (Green Party) and Brook Wimbury (Reform UK).