shops to open..!

I was surprised to see our MP Margot James tell Parliament last week that 4,000 new shops have opened for business in her Stourbridge constituency since she was elected in 2010.

This is an astonishing figure, given that there are only around 100 shops within the entire centre of Stourbridge, surely the most intensive shopping hotspot in the area she represents.

Even assuming that the new shops Ms James spoke of are small ones around three metres wide, put together they would create a continuous super-mall stretching nearly four miles on both sides.

It also means that an average of two new shops have been opened every day, seven days a week, throughout the four years of her tenure.

At first I thought I might have misheard but I checked with the Parliamentary record and the same claim is attributed to Ms James in her congratulations to the Chancellor George Osborne on his Autumn Statement.

Mr Osborne was apparently impressed and he paid tribute to our MP for the work he said she has done in bringing investment into the Black Country. The Stourbridge constituency is actually bounded by Amblecote, Quarry Bank, Wollescote and Wollaston and doesn’t include the Merry Hill centre.

In the same very brief statement, Ms James also asserted to the House of Commons that local unemployment has fallen by 45 per cent while local wages have risen by 12.5 per cent in the four years since she took office.

I am sure that our MP would not deliberately set out to mislead Parliament or her constituents but I hope that she can shed more light on how her figures were calculated and will correct them if necessary.

Yours truly KM Ban Wollescote