Newhaven Chamber was delighted to welcome Maria Caulfield MP to our virtual breakfast meeting today, and she covered a lot of ground in a short period of time.
Maria gave a good overview of Newhaven’s funding including the Future’s High St Fund, The Town Deal and the Levelling Up Fund. She said how dilapidated some of the empty town buildings were especially the old Co-op, and that more work would be needed to bring them back into use. She talked about the UTC building and how expressions of interest were being received and that it was likely to be mixed use.
Maria Caulfield explained about the 3G pitch (a third-generation synthetic surface) for Newhaven which would also be a sports training centre for Seahaven’s young people looking at careers such as refereeing and coaching.
The Port will also to receive £6.2million to increase capacity. Fishing stages will be replaced, and extras staging added to increase trawler capacity plus there would be fish processing infra structure and a fish restaurant on the West Beach promenade. Opening up Newhaven’s sandy beach was still on the agenda.
Much of the money promised for Newhaven must be spent by 2024 and she expected us to see a lot of progress in the next year as these projects get underway.
She said that the majority of the 14,000 people put on furlough in the constituency were back in work and that currently there were just under a 1,000 who had not returned. With the government Eat Out scheme there had been 184,000 meals claimed for and £10m had been given in Business Support.
Questions were asked and answered about energy costs, national insurance, the BBC, the PM and rising prices – so it was a busy meeting.
