The new MP for Mid Buckinghamshire Greg Smith has revealed his key pledges on the Green Belt, Wycombe Hospital, HS2 and other issues, following his re-election.

In a wide-ranging interview, Smith also shares his views on the upcoming Tory leadership race and the timing of the July 4 general election which saw a Labour landslide wipe out 175 of his Tory colleagues, including Rob Butler and Steve Baker in Buckinghamshire.

Smith, the former MP for Buckingham, won the new Mid Buckinghamshire seat comfortably, emerging with just under 6,000 votes ahead of the Liberal Democrats.

A fortnight on from his victory, the Bucks Free Press caught up with the MP following his first surgery of the new parliament in Prestwood.

He says it is his ‘mission’ to make sure the new Labour government in Westminster listens to people in his constituency, which stretches all the way from Steeple Claydon in the North to the villages outside High Wycombe in the South.

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But he fears he will be in ‘firefighting mode’ due to what Labour wants to ‘do to us, rather than with us’, pointing to the new government’s plans to reform planning rules so that more protected Green Belt land can be released for development.

“It is quite clear they are going to put a lot more pressure on Buckinghamshire to build a lot more homes,” Smith says, adding that the county ‘cannot take more Green Belt development’.

The MP is also sceptical of Labour’s promise to renationalise the railways, saying he has not seen any plans to solve ‘practical’ day to day problems like overcrowding on Chiltern Railways trains from Princes Risborough and Haddenham and Thame Parkway to London.

As well as protecting the countryside, Smith pledges to ‘hold HS2’s feet to the fire’ to ensure it fixes Buckinghamshire’s roads, pointing out that the high-speed railway line from London to Birmingham has also caused several sinkholes in the county.

Last year, the MP urged former Prime Minister Rishi Sunak to fully cancel the £65bn infrastructure project.

Another of Smith’s aims is ensuring better access to primary care and medical facilities by, for example, securing a new clinical hub at Wycombe Hospital, which is just 1.5 miles away from edge of his new constituency and is used by his constituents.

The MP claims doctors in Wycombe are ‘losing 2,000 hours of operating time’ per year due to maintenance issues with the hospital’s crumbling 1960s tower, which has a severe maintenance backlog.

He also pledges to keep improving facilities at Stoke Mandeville to help ‘free up bed space’ as well as fighting for new GP surgeries in Long Crendon and Princes Risborough.

Smith pledges to ‘stand up for farmers’ by demanding more funding from the new government and is also critical of Labour’s new bill to exile hereditary peers from the House of Lords.

“I am yet to meet anybody on a single doorstep that was crying out for the reform of the House of Lords,” he says.

The MP also hit out of what he called Labour leader Keir Starmer’s silence on defence spending after the party’s pre-election commitment to ‘spend 2.5 per cent of GDP on defence as soon as we can’.

“It is becoming a seriously unstable world right now,” Smith says, “We have still got war on our own continent with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The Middle East is still a very tense and delicate place.

“There are lots of international voices very concerned about whether China is about to invade Taiwan, yet Labour are not committing to the 2.5 per cent of GDP on defence spending.”

Does Smith welcome any of Labour’s new policies?

“The jury is out on their new Border Security Command,” he says, “Clearly, a lot of people are very upset about the level of illegal migration into the country.”

He adds: “So far, they have scrapped Rwanda and replaced it with a concept. If that concept can work, good.”

Will Smith throw his name in the ring to replace Sunak ahead of the upcoming Tory leadership race?

“No, I am not standing,” he says, adding that that the Conservatives have just ‘suffered a really crushing defeat’ in the general election.

He adds: “First of all, we need to fully, accept, reflect and understand why it was that the public were so cross with us that we are reduced to 121 Conservative MPs.”

The MP says that his party’s next step should not be to have a ‘big internal battle’ but to ‘start the process of re-earning the right to be heard’.

Asked if Sunak was wrong to call the election when he did, he says: “Yes, it took everyone by surprise. There was kind of an expectation that it would be in the autumn. That is when most people on all sides of the political spectrum were prepared for.”

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