'We need to do much more to tackle plastic waste'

This week is Greenpeace’s The Big Plastic Count. Households and schools across the country, including in Stroud, have signed up to take part. Plastic is a big issue and a big concern for local children, who are often educating us adults. When I visited Rodborough Community Primary School last week the majority of the questions were on the topic of plastic waste.

Year 4 pupils at the school are collecting crisp packets from their lunches and sending them to the Stroud Valleys Project as well as learning about the effect of plastic on the environment. They are committed to finding new ways to help both here in Stroud and how the UK can lead the world.

The Government has done a great deal to limit plastic pollution through a range of policies and new laws. The thing people are aware of in their daily lives is how we have managed to stop plastic carrier bags being the norm in shops and banning things like microplastics. We need to do much more nationally and internationally as the amount of plastic waste produced around the world is set to double by 2040.

It is fantastic that the children in Rodborough really understood that good practices start at home and in their schools. I saw many budding environmental scientists in the class!

The idea of the Big Plastic Count is to tally up bottles, packets and other plastic bits used in a household or school for just one week and send the data to Greenpeace.

I hope as many people as possible get involved and the national results will be shared in July.

The Queen’s Speech took place last week with HRH Prince Charles coming to Parliament in place of Her Majesty the Queen who sadly could not manage the various staircases this year. I loved seeing smiling pictures of her over the weekend though. She is such a wonderful role model.

It was a wide-ranging speech that made it clear the government’s focus is to grow the economy to allow us to better weather the cost-of-living pressures. There will be 38 legislation bills for parliament to consider in this session.

As many readers know, I am a passionate champion for further and adult education and a regular visitor and huge supporter of our brilliant SGS College. I did not go to university and I studied to be a solicitor at night school and attended law school at the weekends so I know first hand how important it is to be able to train or retrain or gain vocational qualifications.

So, I was really pleased to see the Government’s ongoing commitment to build a stronger and future-proof lifelong skills system using further and adult education.

We live in a fast-changing world where skills can become redundant much more quickly than ever before. We are also undertaking a green skills revolution with huge opportunities for people to retrain in occupations like electric vehicle repair or operation and maintenance for renewable energy. We need the capacity for adults to retrain into new skills if we are to have a competitive, flexible and highly skilled economy.

This opportunity for all comes via the government’s Lifelong Loan Entitlement. It will provide people with a loan equivalent to four years of education or £37,000 in today’s fees. This can be used over a lifetime for a range of studies including shorter and technical courses. It will allow people to reskill and retrain and get other jobs as the economy develops into new areas.

It is an innovative and radical use of post-18 education designed to allow people to learn, train and remain employable throughout their lives. It is a big plus that will support many thousands and it is long term too. I think it is great and it has my full support.