Newly elected MP promises to continue campaign to secure the re-opening of High Barnet police station

Dan Tomlinson, who was elected Labour MP for Chipping Barnet last July, is to continue the campaign of the previous Conservative MP Theresa Villiers to persuade the Metropolitan Police to re-open High Barnet Police station to offer assistance to the public.

He told the annual meeting of the Barnet Residents Association he would also be applying what pressure he could to try to ensure police officers spend more time on duty within the constituency.

Metropolitan Police data has revealed that Barnet has one of the highest rates among the outer boroughs for the number of local officers sent for police duty to attend demonstrations in central London.

Mr Tomlinson — seen above with the residents’ association chairman Melvyn Sears (left) and planning and conservation officer Janet Littlewood — said his objective was to secure an increase in the local police presence.

The number of officers allocated to the borough had fallen from 200 to 80 during the time the Conservatives had been in office.

Clearly there were not the same number of police “walking around the streets”. Removing officers from outer London to attend demonstrations was an issue that had to be tackled: Barnet had one of the highest rates of extraction.

Mr Tomlinson renewed his pre-election pledge to hold a summit on car theft so that residents could question the police and Barnet Council to see what measures could be taken.

Barnet had one of the highest rates in London for the theft of both cars and catalytic converters.

He began his speech with a tribute to Theresa Villiers who had served as Chipping Barnet MP for 19 years.

She had worked “very hard” for the constituency, and he hoped that in the years to come constituents would acknowledge that he had worked just as hard or even harder. 

He was just as passionate about helping to make Barnet an even better place. Building a Better Barnet was the slogan he intended to adopt as the local MP.

He and his wife – who was born and bred in Barnet – live in Whetstone with their eight-month-old son.

They had a house with a garden, space to bring up a child and room for a car – the kind of home that was the aspiration of suburban life, the issue which Mr Tomlinson addressed in his maiden speech in the House of Commons and which he developed further in his speech to the residents’ association.

At Westminster, he told fellow MPs that that he intended to stand up for suburban life. When a political party understood the suburbs, then and only then, would it be able to govern for the country as a whole.

Suburbanites were reasonable people, they just wanted things to work and for public services to be there, but in his experience as MP for Chipping Barnet that deal had fallen apart.

Young people could not afford to move out of their parents’ home; residents were finding that their cars were being stolen; and suburbanites were finding that their aspirations were not being met any more.

In his speech in Barnet, he set out how he hoped it might be possible to rebuild the deal with the suburbs.

“We need to construct more houses. Young people in London are spending half their income on housing and cannot afford to buy. People in their 60s and 70s have their children still living with them.”

Mr Tomlinson acknowledged the pressure on Barnet Council to meet its house building targets, but he said the Labour government had cut the borough’s target by a quarter because the previous target set by the Conservative government had been designed to make life difficult for the Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan.

The new targets would determine where the government put pressure on councils to release land to build more houses, but Barnet could still make its own decisions on its own local plan.

Building a Better Barnet did not mean he wanted to unleash tower blocks on the constituency but rather maintain the suburban character of the locality.  

 There were high-rise flats in Colindale and mid-rise blocks in Finchley, but Chipping Barnet was different to other parts of the borough.

“We definitely need new houses in this part of Barnet. There will be blocks of flats, perhaps five, six or seven storeys and I am not saying I will oppose every block of flats.

“But we need a mix of house types. If we are going to build more houses, we want the option of houses with gardens.”.

Mr Tomlinson also promised to take up the complaints of many of those in Barnet living in homes on leasehold estates. They were struggling with paying the council tax while also having to pay additional service charges which were going up and up.

Some of these charges were a rip off and he intended to take up complaints with at least one of the managing agents.