Privilege to Serve
PAUL MCLAUGHLIN
The Labour Government has held power for just over 100 days, experiencing a remarkable rollercoaster of highs and lows as new ministers navigate the intense scrutiny of a largely critical mainstream media. Among those elected to Parliament for the first time in July was Helena Dollimore, the new MP for Hastings and Rye and the villages.
In an exclusive interview with the Hastings Independent Press she reflected on the emotion and pride she felt when it was clear she was going to win, the compassion on a human level she felt towards her defeated rival Sally Ann Hart and the sheer relief of her supporters at Labour’s victory.
Unlike in 1997 when Tony Blair’s New Labour promised Britain a new dawn, Sir Kier Starmer’s pitch to voters back in July was much simpler and more prosaic. In essence, it was “we are sensible and trustworthy, whilst the Tories are not.” The public broadly agreed, and Labour secured a massive majority, albeit with just 34% of the national vote.
ELECTION DAY NERVES
The scale of the Labour victory was not apparent on polling day as party workers were anxiously canvassing across the town amid reports of a low turn-out, and Labour’s soon-to-be MP was seen hastily picking up a sandwich at Morrisons in Queen’s Road before heading back out to knock on more doors. Nerves were calmed at 10pm, when the BBC, ITN and Sky reported news of the exit poll which predicted a massive Labour majority. In the early hours of the morning, as the vote was being counted in the Horntye Park Sports Centre and it was apparent that Labour was set to win the seat, it began to dawn on the 30-year-old Dollimore what lay ahead of her. Her first emotion was one of pride, that as a local girl who attended the local Heathfield Community College, she was to be the local MP. She said it was a “great honour”, but one which carried “great responsibility to deliver the change people had voted for”.
Within days of her election, Helena was caught up in the whirlwind of life as a new MP. There were the parliamentary introductions, personal security briefings, IT presentations and the swearing of the Oath of Allegiance. There was also a new dress code to observe – no trainers, only proper shoes, which made finding her way around (or not) the labyrinthine corridors of the Palace of Westminster a more uncomfortable experience than she was expecting.
CASEWORK CHALLENGE
Constituency casework did not stop because of the election, and the new MP had to take over responsibility for all the ongoing cases when she woke up on that first Friday morning. Over the course of the summer, she has pulled together a small team both in Westminster and in Hastings to tackle the workload. She said she was grateful to Sally Ann Hart for doing a proper hand-over of ongoing casework and also paid tribute to Michael Foster and Amber Rudd who have been “really generous” with their advice.
She has received over 5,000 live cases since July and, despite being initially overwhelmed, her team have managed to successfully resolve and close over 1,200 of these. Among them was a pensioner who had been unable to get his full pension for over six years but, after liaising with the Department for Work and Pensions, the full pension was back-dated and paid in full.
Cases dealing with life and death emergencies obviously take precedence, as do problems which can separate families, such as passport issues. She is confident that as her team come to terms with the scale and breadth of the casework, she will respond to problems more quickly and “begin to earn the trust of local constituents”.
The majority of casework relates to housing, and Ms Dollimore believes “here is simply not enough affordable housing available to meet the needs of the town.” This is coupled with the poor quality of some of the accommodation that local residents have to live in. The MP has already met three times with the chief executive of Southern Housing, one of the biggest housing providers, to review the most serious cases.
Housing and Planning Priorities
She is clear that what is desperately needed is more housing. She is a strong supporter of the Government’s plans to change the planning rules and to build more new homes in the town. She says she gets frustrated with the Green-led Hastings BC who argue that there is no room to build the new homes without harming the environment. “Our town is full of brownfield sites that could be homes for local people but have been sitting derelict.”
Ms Dollimore says she is also proud that the Labour government is moving ahead with plans to ban Section 21 no-fault evictions to affirm renters’ rights. She believes this will give tenants more security and confidence in their tenancies.
Another big issue is Southern Water. The problems relate not just to sewage, but to flooding and water outages. Ms Dollimore has been appointed to the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Select Committee and she is keen to look at all the water-related issues in a systematic way, including the increasing number of landslips which are blighting areas along the south coast. In addition to the problems with water, the select committee is also responsible for looking at the fishing industry, and she says she is determined to raise the concerns of the local fishing community which are so important for the town.
The failings within the local education system are also on her radar. She says parents sending their 11-year-old children to schools in Hastings have a choice of three schools rated as “inadequate”. This is “simply not good enough.” In addition, she says she is determined to hold to account the University of Brighton Academies Trust (UBAT) and their allocation of funds for back-office costs rather than using them for frontline teaching for the benefit of pupils. She has been raising her UBAT concerns with the Education Secretary and is pushing the University of Brighton to take responsibility for the academy chain they have set up as “it is their name and reputation at stake, and they need to do more to resolve the problems.”
FAILING SCHOOLS AND UBAT CONCERNS
She fully endorses Labour’s plans to end the tax breaks that private schools enjoy and to use that money to “deliver better and rising standards, in every school for every child”. In this respect, her experience at St Hilda’s College, Oxford had a profound impact. The privilege and expectation of some of the privately educated students contrasted sharply with her own comprehensive schooling and was, she recalls, “an eyes-wide-open experience” which left her determined to close the gap which exists between the standards and expectations of state schools and those in the private sector.
Ms Dollimore acknowledged the criticism of Labour’s decision not to scrap the two-child benefit cap. However, she said the Government was taking action to tackle child poverty and pointed to the establishment of a cross-government taskforce to look at the issue holistically. She also welcomed measures in the Budget to set up school breakfast clubs, the £1 billion Housing Support Fund grant and the rise in the minimum wage as evidence of Labour’s determination to support working people and eliminate poverty for all.
It has been a busy and hectic few months for the town’s new MP. There have been many challenges, but Helena Dollimore says it is a privilege to be able to help people, and she is determined to deliver on what matters most to them.
- Helena Dollimore was born in 1994 and was educated at Heathfield Community College in East Sussex.
- Aged 17 she spoke at the Labour Party Conference in Liverpool. She attended St Hilda’s College, Oxford, and was the chair of the Oxford University Labour Club.
- After university, Dollimore worked for Save the Children, in environments from refugee camps in Bangladesh to the civil war in Yemen
- During the COVID-19 pandemic, Dollimore trained as a vaccinator with the St John Ambulance, volunteering at a pharmacy in Hastings. She has also served as an Army Reservist.
- Dollimore was elected as a councillor for the St Helier ward in the London Borough of Merton in 2021. In 2024, after the general election was called, she resigned her council seat to stand as the Labour parliamentary candidate for Hastings and Rye. She won the seat in July with an 8,653 majority.
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