Wigan borough Labour candidate vows to make town centres safer

That’s the mission the Labour candidate for Leigh and Atherton Jo Platt has set for herself, should she get re-elected in the seat she lost to Conservative James Grundy as the so-called red wall came tumbling town in 2019.

The 51-year-old former Wigan councillor had only two years in Westminster when she won the seat vacated by the now Greater Manchester mayor Andy Burnham in 2017.

Following the bruising Labour defeat five years ago, Ms Platt took a role managing a hub for small businesses at Spinners Mill where there are now 80 independent organisations ‘thriving’.

And she says one of her missions is to help those businesses occupy those empty town centre units across Leigh, Atherton, Tyldesley and Golborne, ‘where they should be’.

She said: “My number one priority, should I be elected, is the town centres in the whole of the constituency.

“You only have to walk up and down here [Bradshawgate in Leigh] to see the issues that we’ve got.

“We did get some levelling up money totalling up to about £30m. That’s going to be my main focus. But obviously, it’s not just about hanging baskets and new paving.

"We’ve got to have more police on our streets, from day one.

“We need to make people feel safer. It’s not just Leigh. Atherton, Golborne, Tyldesley, they’re the same.”

“The other thing as well is the empty shops that we’ve all got on our high streets. We need to give local authorities more powers to be able to take over derelict shops. I’m hugely into community ownership which is what we’ve done at the mill.

“We know we can do it. We’ve got a blueprint there showing what can be done at Spinners Mill.

"How do we get all those 80 businesses at Spinners Mill onto the high street?

"That’s where they should be, creating independent shops, and contributing locally to the economy.

“There’s a real plan of what we want to do to tackle the town centres and what’s blighting us – to get our local economy working again.”

However, she said this would be the only focus of her attention should she regain the seat.

On the doorstep, the cost-of-living crisis and the backlog of people waiting for NHS treatment and adult social care all need urgent attention.

She said: “Everyone knows someone, if it’s not themselves, who have been left waiting for hours, sometimes days, in a hospital corridor.

“And social care is in a mess. We’ve got a national care service plan that we want to put into effect.

“The social issues that we see here every day are a product of broken services. We need to take the pressure off public services.”

“There’s not going to be a magic wand. All this won’t happen overnight if Labour are fortunate enough to get in.”

And she argued that the ‘stringent’ fiscal rules laid out by shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves which stipulate taxes won’t rise and that an incoming Labour government would stick to the Conservatives spending objectives were justified.

“I think she’s right,” she said. “ Because you can’t over-promise and then under-deliver because that would be catastrophic for the party and we wouldn’t last two minutes.”

Much has been said on the doorstep about the erosion of trust in politics and politicians, and Ms Platt said she ‘gets it’.

She added: “We hear it. People vote to make things better, ultimately. And things haven’t got better.

“So then you lose trust with that system and if things get worse, even more so. We need to change that. That’s what Labour are offering. It’s about people regaining trust.

“Within day one, people have got to see it.”