Here are some campaigns that Jeremy has been fighting recently
Jeremy Lefroy is urging residents to tell the Government to "Keep our Post Offices open" by signing the Conservatives petition.
In October last year, 2,000 sub-postmasters marched on parliament protesting at Post Office closures and presented a 4 million signature petition to Tony Blair; the largest ever UK petition.
And Labour still isn't listening. Post offices are the lifeblood of any community. They are vital local institutions, just like a local school or pub.
Post Offices are essential for people who rely on them to collect benefits and pensions. Local business rely on Post Offices, neighbouring small businesses often suffer a drop in trade.
When a local Post Office closes, often the last shop in the community closes too. A van for a couple of hours a week is no replacement for a full time Post Office. Labour's Post Office cuts will hit the vulnerable the hardest.
First Labour cut the NHS. Now they're cutting the Post Office.
4,000 Post Offices have already closed under Labour – that's a quarter of the country's Post Office network.
A Further 2,500 Post Offices are expected to close by 2009.
Gordon Brown my cut support for rural post offices.
As few as 4,000 of Britain's 14,300 Post Offices may survive the decade.
This all means fewer Post Offices, providing fewer services to fewer people.
The Conservative action plan to save our Post Offices
Give sub-Post Offices more freedom to offer a wider range of business services.
Push for more Post Offices to be "One Stop Shops" – trained staff could then advise on a range of matters including tax returns, pension entitlements, the opening hours of local pharmacies, how to apply for a disabled parking badge etc.
Encourage local Councils to open "Council Counters" in local branches.
Allow the Post Office to work with carriers other than the Royal Mail.
Prevent the Royal Mail taking business away from sub-Post Offices by under cutting the prices they can charge for postage.
Jeremy Lefroy and Stafford Conservatives are backing a new, national campaign by David Cameron to underline our support for the staff of our NHS and the patients they serve. The NHS ended the last financial year with deficits amounting to £1.3 billion. Gordon Brown has now ordered drastic and short-sighted NHS cuts.
We want everyone to show their support for the NHS and those who work in it by signing our petition calling on Gordon Brown to end his financial mismanagement of the NHS – and Stop Brown's NHS Cuts.
Sign our petion here:-
----------------------------------------------
Brown's NHS cuts
Job losses: The Royal College of Nursing estimated in August that 18,000 jobs have been cut from NHS hospitals in recent months. However, Conservative Party analysis to update these figures now suggests that the total number of job losses is approaching 20,000.
Community hospitals: Despite Labour's much-vaunted claim that its primary care White Paper, Our Health, Our Care, Our Say, published on 30 January, would spell a reprieve for community hospitals, 81 are still threatened by of cutbacks or closure, according to the Community Hospitals Association.
Bed losses: 2,036 bed losses have already occurred since April, suggesting that up to 4,000 beds may be lost from the NHS over the whole financial year. This is on top of the 2,500 beds which were lost from NHS hospitals in 2004-05 and the 6,000 beds cut from NHS hospitals in 2005-06. In just three years, therefore, the NHS is set to lose 12,500 beds – a cut in capacity of 7 per cent.
The effects of the cuts
Patients are discharged too early: With fewer beds and less money, hospitals have been forced to discharge patients too early, leading to a rocketing emergency readmission rate. From the time statistics were first collected until the end of 2003-04, around 5.5 per cent of all patients were readmitted to hospital as emergency cases 28 days after being discharged. However, since the financial crisis of 2004-05 and associated bed losses, the emergency readmission rate has accelerated to 7.1 per cent – and this increase shows no sign of halting.
Training budgets are being slashed: Labour have only managed to get NHS balance sheets to seem relatively healthy by slashing workforce training budgets. Freedom of Information Act requests to each of England's Strategic Health Authorities have revealed that £150 million of the surpluses they generated in the last financial year is due to underspending on training.
Trainee doctors and nurses face unemployment: The failure to fund workforce training means that drastic cutbacks are affecting the NHS's capacity to take on new staff. A survey in June by the Council of Deans found that just 20 per cent of student nurses graduating in the summer had found a job. This implies that anywhere up to 16,000 of England's 20,000 nursing students may be facing unemployment, despite the fact that it costs up to £39,000 to train each nurse. 93 per cent of this year's 2,529 physiotherapy graduates are unemployed. It costs £28,580 to train each physiotherapist.
Social services are affected: The cutbacks in the NHS are having a knock-on effect on the budgets of local authority social services departments, which have to take up responsibility for patient care as the NHS runs out of money to do so. In March 2006, a report by the Association of Directors of Social Services warned that social services departments faced a funding 'black hole' of £1.8 billion this year - a shortfall directly related to the NHS financial crisis.
Reasons for the cuts
The causes of the NHS financial crisis are legion – but many are due to Labour failure:
Ministerial meddling: There have been ten major reorganisations of the NHS since Labour came to power. Each of these reorganisations has been costly: the merger of Primary Care Trusts and the regionalisation of Strategic Health Authorities in 2006 alone are together estimated to have cost £320 million.
Waste: Labour's financial mismanagement has encouraged a culture of profligacy and waste within the NHS. The number of managers in the NHS is increasing almost three times as fast as the number of doctors and nurses. There are now 264,012 administrators in the NHS, compared to 175,646 beds. In the last year alone, 5,000 more administrators than nurses were recruited. By 2004-05 the extra cost of employing NHS administrators was almost £1.6 billion a year more in real terms than it was in 1999-2000.
Inadequate planning: Labour's failure to pilot the new NHS staff contracts adequately has created a 'black hole' in NHS finances of £610 million. The cost of Agenda for Change – the pay deal for virtually all staff in the NHS except doctors and dentists – was underestimated by £220 million. The cost of the new contract for hospital consultants was underestimated by £90 million and the cost of the new GP contract by £300 million.
Unfair funding: Labour's system of resource allocation means that the areas with most demand on their health services no longer receive the most money. Until Labour came to power, NHS resources were allocated to areas in a way that secured 'equal opportunity of access to healthcare'. However, Labour have specifically added an element to the allocation formula which aims to tackle health inequalities, meaning that some areas with a low disease burden, but deemed to be socially deprived, receive much more funding than areas deemed to be affluent but with a high burden of disease.
---------------------------------------------
What needs to be done – our Conservative approach
An end to Labour's interference: Labour's interference has now led to the tenth reorganisation of the NHS since it came to power nine years ago. We believe decisions affecting local services should not be taken by distant politicians, but by the patients and frontline staff who use and work in our local NHS.
Money where it is needed: Under Labour, too much money has been diverted from patient care by an NHS bureaucracy which has swelled its ranks by over 100,000 people since 1997. And the money which does get through is not going where it is needed. Some areas have been able to build services for patients with money to spare, whereas others have been plunged into debt and forced into making swingeing cutbacks. We believe NHS money should go straight to GPs at the frontline, without Labour's interference along the way. And we believe it should go where it is needed.
Long-term thinking: Gordon Brown's financial mismanagement is forcing short-term decision-making. Hospitals are closing their wards to patients without replacing wards with the services in the community needed. We believe that short-term cuts in the NHS at the expense of building services for the future are unacceptable, and that this short-sightedness will prove even more costly in the long run. Because of the financial crisis, Labour politicians have ignored the very real challenges stacking up for the future – for example, obesity, alcohol abuse, and sexually transmitted diseases. We believe that tackling tomorrow's challenges today will save us lives and resources in the long term.
Jeremy has long been, and continues to be, opposed to the merger of emergency services in Staffordshire into regional forces.
Jeremy Lefroy has been campaigning against the Regional Merger's since they were proposed by the Labour Government.
Following recent news that the Staffordshire Ambulance Service, currently the top performing service in England, will not be merged into a Regional Service (for at least 2 years), Jeremy has expressed his delight, but also concern.
Jeremy is delighted to see the force saved from a merger, but has issued warnings that the campaign must not rest, as the force is not safe forever!
Cllr Lefroy has expressed similar concerns over the potential Police merger, and the news that this merger is now being rethought by the Home Secretary, John Reid.