Gloria De Piero’s MP column: Kirkby job fair is a great chance for a new start

It means that if you are travelling from places like Sutton, Underwood, Jacksdale, Selston or Brinsley and show the bus driver a special coupon, you’ll get a half price Zig Zag ticket for the journey.

The jobs fair is taking at place at Festival Hall, Kirkby from 10am-3pm.

I hope that every A-level student in Ashfield gets the results they’ve worked so hard for (and the same goes to all those youngsters who will soon be opening their GCSE results.

These results are the first steps down your future educational and career paths and I want to wish you all the best of luck.

For young people following the traditional academic route there has always been a clear route from age 14 through GCSEs to A-levels and on to university.

But not enough attention has been paid to the options available to young people who don’t go to university.

Our education system needs to change if we are to set all young people in Ashfield up for the future and if we are to build the high skill, high wage economy we need to succeed.

I’d like to see an end to the culture that says the academic route is always best and vocational skills are second best, with big changes to our education and skills system to create a clear route for the forgotten 50 per cent.

The true scale of the mis-selling of Payment Protection Insurance (PPI) has been enormous and if you haven’t been personally affected than I bet you know someone who has.

It’s estimated that victims could be due a combined £9bn and as a result the financial ombudsman recently revealed it’s dealing with up to 5,000 new complaints a week.

I’m continuing to take up lots of cases on the behalf of local folk BUT there’s no need to be tempted by one of those annoying phone calls – come and see me instead.

I’ve just helped one man from Selston with his complaint after he kept getting knocked back by HSBC.

In fact it’s fair to say he was treated pretty shoddily. With my help he went to the ombudsman and low and behold they awarded in his favour, meaning his bank has to pay his premiums back plus interest.