At Conservative conference the other week the Prime Minister announced some amazing record-breaking investments for Mansfield and the Midlands as a whole.
Last week I wrote about the Government’s significant backing of our town with £20 million of new funding to support all sorts of projects - taking our total pot of Levelling Up money to over £72 million!
This funding will improve town centre parking, build a new Warsop Leisure Centre, regenerate the old Co-op and Stockwell Gate, and so much more, there’s even money to turn the Sherwood Observatory into a Planetarium!
If you include the Severn Trent investment of £76 million, that’s installing thousands of flood-alleviating “rain gardens” all over the town, with the added benefit of also being attractive new green spaces, that’s over £150 million in funding for various improvements since I was elected Mansfield’s MP!
We also had fantastic news for the whole Midlands too, with £2.2 billion additional funding for roads and potholes, hundreds of millions of pounds to improve bus services, and an extension to the £2 single bus fare!
It’s great to be able to follow on so quickly from my column last week with more great news about the other major investments taking place in our town that are making great progress, with spades soon to go into the ground!
I was pleased to hear last week that the new Special Educational Needs and Disabilities (SEND) school to be built in Ravensdale, funded by Nottinghamshire County Council, has been given unanimous backing after a consultation.
With significant waiting lists for these school places, both locally and nationally, it's fantastic that we're going to be able to offer this bespoke new school building for children with SEND, and that the consultation has received such support.
The school will open by the end of 2025 on the site of the old Ravensdale Middle School, which was demolished after it closed in 2001 and the site has been derelict ever since.
Progress has also been made over the last couple of weeks on our new Community Diagnostic Centre (CDC), with more tests and check-ups now available at Mansfield Community Hospital.
Sitting right next door to the hospital, our new CDC will be built by the end of 2025, which will deliver 117,000 extra checks for patients each year.
It’s great to see that in the meantime, increased investment into healthcare is reaching patients at our existing infrastructure, meaning that by the end of this year almost 500 extra blood tests, MRI and ultrasound scans will have been available to patients each week.
All this investment is fantastic news! I’m proud as Mansfield’s MP to work with Government to secure all this funding, and now we’re seeing lots of this investment get physically underway, we can start to realise the transformative effects this will have on people and their families in the years to come!
