Our young people deserve a better future

STOOD to be the MP for East Thanet because I believe strongly that coastal communities like ours have been let down by 14 years of Conservative government, which has left a legacy of insecure work and an economy that simply doesn't work for the ordinary people. Nowhere is this clearer than in the latest youth unemployment figures, which show that 11.6 per cent of young people in Thanet were out of work in March.

- Polly Billington

This crisis is personal to me. I grew up in the 1980s, a time when hundreds of thousands of young people walked straight from school to the dole office. One of the reasons I entered politics was to ensure a situation like that would never happen again. Yet today, one thousand young people in Thanet aged 18 to 24 are not in education, employment, or training. I will never accept young people being failed in that way.

There is no quick fix, but I strongly believe that with the right investment we can build a more resilient local economy one that offers good, secure, year-round jobs. As chair of the MPs' group for Coastal Communities, I am fighting to ensure coastal towns like ours are central to the Government's upcoming industrial strategy. We already have the building blocks of what we need here.

Thanet could and should be a leader in growth sectors like the creative industries, tourism and hospitality, logistics, and green energy.