Chris Webb on impatience for change, the Metropole and more
PLUS: Grandad taking indecent images of kids at Air Show walks free from court
Hello and welcome to The Blackpool Lead.
This week is part one of our interview with Blackpool South MP Chris Webb who is now around 12 months into the job. He sat down with Michael Holmes to discuss all that is happened in that time - and the challenge now facing Labour to regain public support.
We didn’t shy away from asking Webb difficult questions - as you’d expect - but if you didn’t see the question you want then it’s likely coming in part two.
The petition started by campaigners in Fleetwood in relation to the Jameson Road landfill - and the smells coming from it - has now passed 10,000 signatures and so will get a government responses. On the flipside, Transwaste has hailed the results of the latest Environment Agency air quality monitoring report which say that rather than being inherently and directly dangerous, it just stinks.
And we were in court this week to see a Grandad from Cumbria avoid jail after taking indecent images at Blackpool Air Show.
The Metropole problem, the need for change and his first 12 months - Chris Webb interview part one
By Michael Holmes
They say politicians age like football managers but Chris Webb arrives at Stanley Park on a sunny bank holiday Monday looking younger than he ever did on the campaign trail. He has lost four stone over the past year and has a glow that seems out of place on the face of a toddler’s parent. Pushing Cillian’s pram towards the metal tables and chairs outside the park’s cafe, Chris, who recently turned 39, looks relaxed. There is no public relations officer in tow to make sure he says the right thing - or does not say the wrong thing - and he never asks what questions to expect.
As Chris joins me at a table and pours himself tea from a freshly brewed pot, we set the ground rules for an exclusive sitdown interview with The Blackpool Lead to mark his first year as an MP. He is told there are some tough questions to come but no obvious gotchas, such as ‘What is a woman?’, but he says he is happy to be asked anything, as politicians should be. Can I name his young son, who sits beside us clutching his stuffed owl toy and watching intently with his huge blue eyes? Chris has no issue with that. So, with no ground rules to actually set, we have a brief natter about meaningless stuff to break the ice. And then we go on the record.
This is where, from my experience speaking to politicians across the spectrum, the tone tends to switch from jovial to, if not completely adversarial, definitely more measured and guarded. But there is no visible gear-change in Chris, which means he either presents as a politician just how he is as a person or is an Oscar-worthy actor.
Chris and I are roughly the same age, we live a few miles apart and both have young children. So my opening question is one I would like to be asked: “How are you really?”
I demand a genuine answer.
“I’m good,” he says, smiling from behind a pair of Ray-Bans. “It’s been a great year.”
Over the next 90 minutes, Chris and I cover a wide range of topics, him with his pot of tea and me with my cappuccino. From finding the right balancing act between fatherhood and politics to the death threats he receives online, and from Blackpool’s continuing woes with poverty, crime and poor quality of secondary education, among others, to wider global issues such as the war in Ukraine and conflict in Gaza, not much is left off the table.
I am keen to set the stage by talking about his daily life and how he juggles being a dad and working such a demanding job, which sees him spend much of his week in Parliament in the capital or dealing with constituents in his hometown.
“I’ve got the right balance,” he says as he successfully soothes 15-month-old Cillian to sleep. “I’m away three nights a week for roughly 35 weeks of the year when Parliament is sitting. I’m very, very lucky that Cillian interacts on FaceTime so we’re able to do that every night before bed. I always phone home every night before he goes to bed and then I’ll phone the wife (Tyldesley ward councillor Portia Webb) when I’m leaving Parliament to catch up with her as well.”
Was it tempting for Chris to throw himself into his work when he first won power, winning a byelection following Tory Scott Benton’s resignation, last May?
“No. I set the parameters pretty early. I wanted to set that. I was a new dad. I was hands-on from the beginning and still am. There will be meetings and events that Cillian comes with me to every month, whether my wife has got work or to also just spend time with him. And, you know, sometimes it’s to give my wife a bit of a break, as all mums need.”
His actions - including instinctively and unflinchingly wiping Cillian’s runny nose with his bare fingers - tell of the story of a man well-versed in the routine albeit gross acts of parenthood rather than someone pretending in front of the press.
Chris says he rarely works Sundays, acknowledging his need for rest, too. “I need it as well. I need, actually, family and friends because that keeps me grounded. Because Westminster is a bubble. It’s an incredible bubble that can suck you in. I could go down Sunday night and come back Friday night, there’s always something going on there. But you have to set your boundaries and be organised.
“I went into this… Quite simply, I wasn’t interested in being a minister, wasn’t interested in climbing the greasy pole, as they call it. For me, the pinnacle was representing my hometown.”
And how does parenthood influence Chris’s politics? It must do in some way, especially because he - like many of us - also has to pay eye-watering childcare fees.
He says: “It does drive me more, I have to be honest, in a way that I didn’t expect. Because now, for me, what I’m trying to do is create a better place to live for Cillian and his generation to have opportunities here that have eluded the town for so long. So I have that personal motivation.
“And it also makes me impatient for change. That’s why I have been quite robust with the council and have been robust with other stakeholders. We can do something, we have the influence and the power so let’s get on with it. We don’t have to pussyfoot around anymore. We can roll up our sleeves and get it done, and that’s how I’ve tried to work.”
He adds: “Childcare, a massive issue for so many parents in this town. We’re looking at putting childcare in schools to make it affordable. We’re bringing in free breakfast clubs right across the country and we will be supporting those in half-term. Of course I want to see things go further. I want free school meals (for every child) for lunchtime; I think that solves a lot of the poverty.
“The council for over 10 years has been providing free breakfasts in schools. It’s been leading the way. This government is now going to move that out right across the country. But I want to see the council and others to get the resources to go further and give free lunches.”
Promises for the future are all well and good, but progress on key issues has been slow since Labour took control of the country and the government’s popularity has been on the wane. Why does Chris think that is?
“We’ve brought waiting lists down in the NHS for the past seven months,” he answers. “Which is great for hundreds of thousands. But if you’re one of the seven million, sat in your house in Mereside, you’re saying: ‘Waiting lists have come down for seven months but I’m still waiting’.
“Of course you’re going to be annoyed, and I get that. So we have to keep moving at pace, we have got to keep looking at the issues and all the other problems we have had over the past 14 years, with the breakdown of the NHS and public services that have created a lot of problems in society.”
Unprompted, Chris turns to the “asylum crisis”, saying Labour is “tackling” it and “deporting those who shouldn’t be here”.
He says: “But then people always point to me and say, ‘What about the Metropole?’”, the seafront hotel that was picked by the previous, Conservative government to house asylum seekers.
People want instant solutions to problems that have been more than a decade in the making, Chris argues.
“They are as impatient as I am and many of my colleagues are for change. But the problems were that deep. And that’s why people voted to get out the previous government. They wanted change.
“I think we will see a significant improvement by the next general election (which will be held by August 2029), I really do. We’ve got to get the foundations, we’ve got to get it right.”
But why hasn’t Chris, a Labour MP, been able to work with the Labour government and the Labour council to empty the Metropole of asylum seekers in the last year?
It was a Tory decision to put them there, after all.
“The contract with Serco (one of the companies paid by the taxpayer to house asylum seekers across the country) will go to 2028/29 with the previous government,” he says. “The previous government said to Blackpool, ‘This hotel will only be in use for three months’. That was in 2021. The council vehemently opposed it, I was vocal, saying ‘This is the wrong place, the wrong town to do this, with the deprivation’.”
(Chris’s predecessor Benton, who represented Blackpool South until a lobbying scandal led to a byelection, and Paul Maynard, who was Tory MP for Blackpool North and Cleveleys [now Blackpool North and Fleetwood] until he lost his seat to Labour’s Lorraine Beavers in the general election, also publicly opposed the plan, speaking out against their own party.)
It does not look good, I put it to Chris, when homeless people are sleeping in tents below the windows of rooms occupied by migrants at the public's expense, as is seen at the Metropole.
It can lead to accusations of inequality - of one rule for some people and another for others.
That argument was heard loudly outside the Britannia-run hotel during the riots that followed the Southport killings last year - and was voiced again directly to Chris during a peaceful protest in South Shore a few days later.
“That’s the perception but in reality that’s not the case,” Chris responds.
“People aren’t seeing the work that goes on day in, day out with the homelessness team here, the partnership, which I have been involved in, with charities and the council to engage with these people and to get them off the street. I secured £2.8m to solve the problem, not just to get them accommodation but to ask, ‘Why are you on the street? What are the problems? Is it alcohol or drug addiction? Is it mental health? Is it financial?’ There’s a whole range of issues why people find themselves homeless and we’ve got to tackle those. And the team are doing that at pace in Blackpool but unfortunately you will always get certain people that want to be in tents.
“If you look during Covid, the government at the time gave every council the money to take homeless people off the streets and put them in hotels. We still had people in tents because they did not want to go in hotels, for various reasons.”
With almost 95% of Blackpool’s population being white, why is immigration such a hotly debated topic, alongside trans rights (incidentally, about 0.5% of the town’s over-16s identified as a gender different to their sex at birth during the last census) - especially when the town has so many tangible problems?
“I think social media plays a horrible part in it to whip up that hate,” Chris says. “I think some political leaders have used it to dodge their own political failures while they’ve been in power. It’s easy subjects to go on rather than solving the fundamental issues.
“Actually a lot of this doesn’t affect the majority of people’s lives, when cost of living, crime, education, health, that’s all affecting people right now in Blackpool and that’s why they’re the priorities that I’m leading on.
“We’re a great town and, I think, a great country that treats people tolerably. We are understanding of people who are different and want to live their lives the way they are and it affects nobody.
“Unfortunately, that small minority of people that want to shout about these issues are very loud and know how to be loud.
“You go on trans issues - you look at a town where Funny Girls has thrived for decades. You have Pride, where families come out every year to celebrate the fantastic culture that we have got here and the fantastic LGBTQI+ community that is every year out in droves supporting it. That’s the good that unfortunately doesn’t get shown enough, but the negativity and the hate does. That also clicks well online.
“I think we have to show a bit more positivity. I understand people are frustrated, they’re upset, they’re angry, especially after the last decade of what they’ve gone through.
“People’s lives are tougher right now. They haven’t got as much money in their pocket. As a family, for us growing up in Blackpool, we had a house, we had a holiday once a year - whether it was Pontin’s or wherever around the country - and there was always food on the table. And that was all on a postman’s wage. You couldn’t do that now.”
Landfill petition passes 10,000 threshold - but Transwaste hails air report win
Well done to everyone campaigning in Fleetwood regarding the Jameson Road landfill, which we have reported on regularly over the last few months.
They wanted the petition, which calls for landfills that cause smells close to residential areas to close, to get past 10,000 signatures and therefore prompt a response from the government.
That happened on Wednesday this week and so that response should be coming soon.
But Friday saw the Environment Agency release their air quality report.
A spokesperson for the Environment Agency said: “We completely understand the impact this landfill has had on the community and we’d like to reassure them that we are maintaining our increased regulatory response. This includes frequent odour checks and regular site inspections.
“A new Air Quality Monitoring Report for Jameson Road landfill, which includes data from 9 May 2024 to 19 March 2025, has now been published.
“We have made it clear that we expect significant improvements to gas infrastructure and close control over the types of waste accepted for operations at the site to continue.”
Meanwhile, Transwaste used the opportunity to take aim at local residents who have worked hard to organise a campaign.
They said: “The biggest and longest study into air quality surrounding the Jameson Road land fill site has concluded that air quality is well within WHO safety standards - directly contradicting claims made by objectors that they are being poisoned.”
We have not had the chance to go through the report ourselves - nor speak with independent experts about the report - but it bears repeating that if residents can be accused of bias then so can industry. We’ll have a further report on Wednesday.
Man walks free after taking pictures of kids at Blackpool Air Show
By Jamie Lopez
A grandad caught taking indecent images of young girls at Blackpool Air Show has been spared jail.
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