After a very busy week in the House of Commons working on the Government’s new immigration legislation, I was back in North Cornwall late on Thursday night for a number of constituency engagements on Friday. 

My first visit of the day was in Jacobstow where I joined Cornwall Rural Housing Association and children from the local primary school up on the new development in the village. 

The homes which are being built will all be affordable houses and they will be for local families in the area. This is the first such development in Jacobstow for many years and I am really proud to have been able to offer my support to CRHA. 

In total, 13 new affordable homes are being built and they will be a mix of 2/3 bed family homes and some bungalows. 

This really will be a special scheme, with a big focus on biodiversity, affordability, and future living. Broadly, Government funding from Homes England and Council grants account for around 40% of the overall scheme cost.

My second visit of the day was in Marshgate where I met Jason Bickersteth the new Postmaster for the area. Jason has not only taken on post office services in Marshgate, but he is also running a mobile service for St Breward and has expressed an interest in expanding this to Wadebridge. I will be speaking to Royal Mail and Wadebridge Town Council in the coming days to see if we can facilitate this for local people. 

Following a quick lunch, I joined Cornwall Councillors Barry Jordan and Rob Rotchell in Camelford at the consultation event for the planned Tesco supermarket. Tesco briefed me on their plans which include changes to the road layout and their vision for how the proposed store will look. 

They also estimated that if it goes ahead it could lead to around one hundred new jobs being created in the local area. 

It sounds promising but I was keen to stress that any new store should work with existing businesses and not displace them. I’ll continue to follow the project closely.

I was pleased to see that the £2 single bus journey scheme is set to continue. It will be available across Cornwall until the end of October, so however long your single journey may be, it will not cost more than £2. 

Cornwall Council has frozen all singles, returns, and town tickets, however, there will be some rises to other fares from July 2nd including our multi-journey tickets, which will be going up in order to minimise the impact of increased operating costs. Day, week, and monthly tickets still offer great value and are still lower than their March 2022 price when Government funding from the Department for Transport launched Make Big Savings by Bus’. The scheme offers discounted bus fares to everyone across the county and saw Transport for Cornwall reduce most bus fares by 35% in April 2022.