PRIME Minister Boris Johnson is on the campaign trail in the North East today and maintained his government remains ‘fanatically focused’ on its levelling-up agenda.
Mr Johnson was joined by Hartlepool MP Jill Mortimer on a tour around the town’s nuclear power station where he hinted at a bright future for the site and spoke of the Conservatives’ ongoing ambitions for the region.
He said: “Almost exactly a year ago Jill and I were here in Hartlepool and since that time I talked about delivering, I talked about the North East, I talked about our ambitions, and since that time you have seen GE come in with their turbines investment on the Teesside site.
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"And the Freeport is going gang busters, thanks to Mayor Houchen, it's making great progress."
He highlighted developments at the Sunderland Nissan factory and the Saudi Arabia-based alfanar group’s £1bn investment on Teesside, saying: “You can see investment really coming into the North East hand over fist and it is fantastic to see it.
"And what we are talking about here today is the need to deal with the immediate issues which are people’s energy bills and how to make sure we have a long-term sustainable energy strategy – and we can.”
Mr Johnson said the country would ‘get back to winning ways’ and his government was exploring the future potential of the Hartlepool power station site once the existing reactor comes to the end of its lifespan in two year’s time.
He said they were looking at whether an advanced modular reactor could be built at the site.
He added: “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.
And looking towards the local elections taking place in parts of the region on May 5, Mr Johnson said that voters should ‘focus on what the Conservatives are doing to transform people’s opportunities in the North East’.
He said that getting more police officers on the street, improving internet connectivity and infrastructure investment were all priorities, adding that Conservative-run councils ‘fill in four times as many potholes and take out bins twice as fast’.
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“Conservatives deliver the lowest possible council tax with the best possible services,” he said.
Acknowledging the hardship faced by some due to rising living costs, Mr Johnson said the best answer was to create more high wage jobs and help people into work.
Asked whether he feels his party has done enough to keep hold of the ‘Red Wall’ traditional Labour heartlands that it won over in the last election, Mrr Johnson said: “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.”
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