General election: Lisa Nandy on the local and national challenges ahead

Until the dissolving of parliament at the end of May, Ms Nandy was the Shadow Cabinet Minister for International Development, and is hoping to help Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour Party to a General Election win on July 4.

But it was matters closer to home that were most on her mind when she spoke to the Local Democracy Reporting Service.

“I didn’t come into politics to make things less worse for people,” she said. “I want to start changing and improving lives in two weeks’ time. It’s possible we’ll get the chance to do that for the first time in 14 years.

“I know that it’s not going to be easy. We are under no illusions about the scale of the challenge. But I would give anything to be the person who was being berated for not having done enough, rather than for being someone who just couldn’t do it.”

A glance at the Labour manifesto gives an indication there is a long ‘to-do-list’ on Sir Keir’s agenda.

But Ms Nandy says she is keen to right the wrongs that she says had been done to Wigan – the town where she lives and which she has represented since 2010.

On the burning issue of local government finance, she said: “Wigan has had the third worse budget cuts in the country. It means that the council has had to cancel contracts with local businesses and then those businesses started to struggle.

“It’s become a vicious cycle. You can see on our high streets, people haven’t got money in their pockets to go out and spend and we’ve lost a lot of our big destination stores in the town centre.”

She pointed to the demise of the Post Office, Debenhams and M&S which she said had had “a massive impact on the whole town”.

Ms Nandy said that, if Labour gets elected, councils like Wigan will get longer-term funding settlements so they have much more ability to plan.

“At the moment they get one-year deals, which is an absolute nonsense because they are often setting their budgets before they even know how much it is,” she said.

“Of course, that means that people’s priorities locally are shut out of the conversation and we can’t work together with the community to reshape services in tough times.”

And she commended the ‘Wigan Deal’, introduced after 2010, which she said was about bringing people into the conversation when it first realised that big cuts to public services were imminent.

“We put people back in charge of what they wanted to see in their communities,” she said. “For example, the council had planned to shut all the libraries, apart from the town centre one because there was no money. We got together with the community who said ‘we really don’t want that to happen’ and so we managed to keep them all open.

“A lot of them are on reduced hours, some of them are run by volunteers or by Book Cycle which is our most successful one in Beech Hill. So we found a different way of working which has meant that we’re bringing the community with us and putting them at the centre of everything that we do and it’s a model that has been picked up by other people.”

And she refuted Conservative claims that cutting council budgets had forced them into becoming more “efficient".

She countered: “It’s not about whether councils become more efficient.

“It’s about whether they can carry out their core responsibilities. We’re fortunate here to have a very good local council.

“We’ve had some incredible female chief executives over the years, who’ve had a real vision for the borough.

“But every council in the country is having a real struggle to fund the basics like care for the elderly. Obviously, the pandemic didn’t help with that. The Tories will say that they have given funding for councils, but what they don’t say is that that was dependent on every council in the country putting up council tax by the maximum amount. People around here just don’t have that sort of money.

“After 14 years of Tory government, we don’t earn enough to have money in our pockets to pay higher taxes, so it’s been a real dilemma for a lot of councils, including my own.”

A significant factor in the election campaign has been how little both of the major parties have mentioned Brexit but Ms Nandy, who was a Remainer back in the 2016 Referendum, was happy to discuss it.

She said: “I wasn’t surprised by the result of the referendum. I think for years, the people that talked most about the European Union had been opponents of us having EU membership, so the debate had been pretty one-sided nationally.

“I accept that all of us have a responsibility for that, because there wasn’t a balanced debate in the run-up to the Referendum. I knew, having been the MP here since 2010, and I live here, it’s not just my constituents, it’s my friends, family and neighbours, the people I talk to in the pub, I knew full well that people were on balance in favour of us coming out of the European Union.”

She said that she had no qualms about being one of the Labour MPs who rebelled against the party and voted for Johnson’s deal in 2019.

“I don’t regret it at all,” she continued. “It’s very rare that over the last 14 years I’ve had to chose between my political party and my constituents, but I’ve always put them first.

“It’s a basic question of respect. They [the constituents] and the country voted to leave and that was the outcome and we had to move forward as a country. I’m glad that we have now.

"I think there’s still work to be done on improving the Brexit deal, which I don’t think is good enough, particularly for our local businesses who did trade with the EU and who now really struggle.”

But she added: ” We can do far more to fix that in government. But the question of EU membership is settled, at least for a generation. It’s time for the country to move on.”