Transport Secretary, Chris Grayling MP, visited Havering College’s Railway Academy today on Harold Hill to see for himself how British workers are being trained to deliver big rail infrastructure projects like HS2 and Crossrail 2.
The visit was arranged by me and my team with Havering College and followed a meeting held in Westminster earlier this year with Mr Grayling.
The Academy is the brainchild of rail expert, Mary Roberts, and provides an intensive five-week course to jobseekers and ex-offenders that has a tremendous success rate in getting people back to work. The Transport Secretary and I talked to trainees about their past careers, and were told how the Academy has turned around the prospects of men of all ages who had either taken a wrong turn, lost confidence in themselves or had struggled to secure careers with a long-term future.
Mr Grayling set out the steady number of rail projects in the pipeline as the government seeks to undertake massive investment in UK railways, and assured trainees that they had chosen a career path with very bright prospects.
It was fantastic to talk to the trainees about how the Academy has turned their lives around in such a short space of time, furnishing them with the kinds of practical skills that are in high demand and restoring a sense of self-worth that they have long deserved but struggled until now to find. The Transport Secretary was really impressed with what he saw, and I hope that this kind of initiative can be rolled out to other areas so that we can provide companies with a steady flow of hard-working, properly trained and enthusiastic British rail workers.
Heathrow Hub...
After visiting the Academy, I took the Transport Secretary to Havering Town Hall to share with him the borough’s vision for a Heathrow logistics hub on the Beam Reach site in Rainham. If Heathrow gets the green light for expansion, it wants to establish four logistics hubs for the off-site construction of the expanded airport. This would be a pioneering method of construction, bringing the engineering and manufacturing jobs of the future to wherever a hub is established.
As we prepare to leave the EU, I am passionate about turning the government’s Global Britain agenda into something of tangible benefit to constituents. One of the big decisions before parliament relating to that agenda right now is airport expansion. How can we ensure that Havering residents gain from this?
I am currently working with Havering Council and neighbouring MPs in Havering and Essex to bid for one of Heathrow’s logistics hubs to be built at Beam Reach, transforming a vast brownfield site next to our constituency into a centre of modern industry and logistics. The hub would reignite use of the River Thames to transport parts to Heathrow and it would connect Rainham to the growing ports of Tilbury and London Gateway, placing Havering as the link between London and trade with the rest of the world.
We showed the Transport Secretary how the hub proposal could unlock massive regeneration opportunities for our region in terms of jobs, business opportunities, education and housing. Havering College and CEME already have campuses nearby to train local people for engineering and manufacturing jobs, but a Heathrow hub could help us attract a university campus to the site and draw on Rainham’s history in steel, distribution and car-manufacturing by providing the blue-collar work of the future.
With Heathrow’s team visiting us next week to assess the bid, I hope they will see just what enormous economic benefit could be spread to our borough as we strengthen trading links between our nation and the rest of the world. I know I am biased but I truly believe our pitch is strong enough to beat the 64 other sites that are in the running across the UK.
