Marie Goldman, the new Lib Dem MP for Chelmsford, made her maiden speech in the debate on the Budget Responsiblity Bill.

The text is below:

First, I congratulate Members who have also made their maiden speeches in the Chamber this afternoon. In particular, I congratulate the hon. Member for Swindon North (Will Stone). I wonder whether his skills as a Brazilian jiu-jitsu black-belt led him to apply to be an extra in those movies that he mentioned. I will be watching out for him in the fight scenes.

It is the honour and privilege of my life to be standing in this Chamber giving my maiden speech as the Member of Parliament for Chelmsford. It is a wonderful, young city located in the heart of Essex that I have had the joy to call my home for the past 20 years or so. The constituency covers the main urban area of the city of Chelmsford. It is blessed with beautiful parks and flanking rivers that wind their way through the city centre, passing the home of the Essex Eagles at the Essex county cricket ground. We have a thriving high street that attracts shoppers from miles around. Investment into the constituency from the public and private sectors means that its future continues to look bright.

From Waterhouse Farm in the west, to Chelmer village in the east, and from Springfield in the northern reaches to the southern boundaries of Goat Hall and everywhere in between, I am proud to call Chelmsford my home and even prouder to be standing here today representing its constituents in this magnificent place.

Chelmsford has one of the busiest two-platform train stations outside of London. Having now rejoined the ranks of the commuters, I know at first hand the importance of the brand-new station being constructed just outside of the northern edge of the constituency. The new Beaulieu Park station will have a significant positive impact on passengers from Chelmsford, giving them more choice and flexibility and removing the need for many of them to travel into the city centre to commence their rail journey.

A new station must not be seen as job done, however. Train travel in this country is expensive and complicated. Ultimately, I do not believe that the public care too much about who runs the trains; they care more about how much rail travel costs them, whether the trains run on time and whether they are comfortable and efficient. They are often frustrated by the bewildering array of ticket options, whose detailed restrictions seem designed either to make them miss their train as they try to work out which one to buy, or to make them buy the wrong ticket. They are not designed for the faint of heart or the novice traveller. That seems like madness if we want to encourage more people to make use of public transport. The whole system needs to be simplified, and I am keen to see the legislation passed yesterday do just that. Without an economy that can support investment in new rail stations or the redevelopment of junctions, including the major Army and Navy interchange in the centre of Chelmsford, we know that such projects are in danger of never happening at all.

I am pleased to support the Bill before us today to ensure that the terrible, wasteful fiscal mistakes of previous Governments are not repeated, leaving more headroom for investment in our country’s future. The new Beaulieu Park station was important to my predecessor, Vicky Ford, and I pay tribute to her dedication to that project. It is the culmination of more than a decade of partnership work in Chelmsford that Vicky joined after her first election to Parliament in 2017. Knocking on doors throughout this year’s campaign, many constituents were grateful for her help with issues they had raised with her. They also noted her visible loyalty to her party, as she was rarely seen without her trademark blue nail polish to match her little blue car and an outfit that almost invariably included a splash of blue. I thank her for the time she spent serving the Chelmsford constituency.

From the very bottom of my heart, I thank the constituents of Chelmsford who have placed their trust in me to represent them in this place. I know they did not do so lightly. Indeed, it has taken 74 years of careful consideration for the good people of Chelmsford to send to this place anyone other than a Conservative. Indeed, it has been 100 years since they made the choice to elect a Liberal to represent them. That slow pace of electoral change in Chelmsford may lead those not familiar with Essex’s first city to conclude that Chelmsfordians have little appetite for innovation, but nothing could be further from the truth.

Among other things, Chelmsford has a rich and distinguished history in the world of science and technology. Most notably, it hosted the first ever entertainment radio broadcast in the United Kingdom in 1920 from the Marconi New Street works right in the centre, featuring Dame Nellie Melba. That led to regular entertainment broadcasts from Great Baddow in the south of the constituency and eventually to what we now know as the BBC.

It is hard to spend much time knocking on doors in Chelmsford and speaking to Chelmsford residents without coming across someone who used to work for Marconi. Its modern-day successor Teledyne e2v, located little more than a stone’s throw away from the site of the original Marconi factories, has more than taken up the mantle of innovation in Chelmsford. Many of my constituents are now employed there. Think of any space mission of the past few decades and the chances are that its imaging equipment contained components designed and built by Teledyne in Chelmsford. From NASA’s New Horizons mission to Pluto and the Kuiper belt, launched in 2006, to the planned 2028 launch of Ariel by the European Space Agency to observe the atmospheres of thousands of planets beyond our own solar system, Teledyne and its employees are reaching for the stars.

That is what I want everyone to have the opportunity to do: to reach for the stars, to feel that sense of opportunity and to know that even the sky is not the limit. But they can do that only if we invest, and the very best place for that investment is in our children and young people. We are lucky in Chelmsford to have excellent schools. I thank the teachers and other school staff who work so hard every day to give the children we entrust into their care the best possible start in life, but they are increasingly doing so with their hands tied behind their backs, with dwindling resources, crumbling buildings and ever greater workloads.

I am the first in my family to go to university and the first elected to any public office—let alone as a Member of this House. I have been able to achieve that because I have had a loving and supportive family, lots of incredible campaign volunteers—and, of course, a sizeable dose of luck. But I also know that a critical part of my success is owed to the amazing state school education that I received, the dedicated and inspirational teachers I was lucky enough to be taught by throughout my school life, and the extracurricular activities—in my case, largely music based—that broadened my horizons and lifted my eyes to the stars.

I worry that that is not the overwhelming experience of those going through our education system today. I worry that children are going through the day with little or no food in their bellies, I worry that schools are having to cut clubs because they no longer have the time or the resources to hold them, and I worry that the performing arts, such as music and drama, have been seen for too long by previous Governments as expendable and an unimportant luxury without recognition that they provide children with the skills and confidence to stand up on large stages—dare I say, in parliamentary Chambers—and be heard. If you are a child with special educational needs or disabilities, well, good luck with that, because the system is utterly, tragically, devastatingly broken. But I also take hope from the wind of change that blew just a couple of months ago. We know that there will be difficult choices ahead, but my hope is that we recognise that investing early on and giving children the best possible start can pay much greater dividends in the future.

When Guglielmo Marconi brought his fledgling inventions and experiments to the United Kingdom in 1896, he did so because he believed that this is a country that can see potential and will invest in that potential for the long term. It paid off, and a whole industry grew from the humble beginnings of a short radio broadcast in the heart of my constituency. Whatever choices are made by the Government in the looming Budget, it is my sincere hope that they recognise the importance of giving schools and teachers the resources they need to allow all children to reach for the stars.