Interviews, Political | Posted on October 29th, 2025 | return to news

Bournemouth MP Tom Hayes: ‘We have to restore faith in politics’

The Labour MP for Bournemouth East came onto the Your Voice | Dorset Podcast to discuss his first year in office.

Tom Hayes was elected the Labour MP of Bournemouth East in last year’s General Election. The seat of Bournemouth East has been won by the Conservatives since its creatin in 1974, but Tom won it with 40.8 per cent of the vote.

Originally from Salford in Greater Manchester, Tom’s experience includes running a charity that offered mental health, domestic abuse and homelessness services, and was a councillor for 10 years at Oxford City Council.

In August, he came onto Your Voice| Dorset Podcast with Luke Graham to discuss his first year in office. Here are some highlights from that interview.

Luke: Why are you in politics?

Tom: I grew up caring for two disabled people, my mum and dad. We just did not have very much money at all.

That experience, of having to support the people you love most in the world from a very early age [and help them] navigate systems that continually let them down, burned into me that sense of injustice.

I was very lucky. We had neighbours around us [who] would go the extra mile to help me out. I had teachers who let me stay beyond the school day to make sure I had somewhere warm and safe to do my homework. I wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for the contributions they made. So that combination of feeling like ‘it’s just wrong’ and I owe it to people who helped me to get on in life, is why I got into politics.

Luke: How have you found this first year of being the MP for Bournemouth East?

Tom: Things happen so fast that being able to identify what change you want to achieve and being really single minded about pursuing it feels to me the thing that I’ve learned the most over the last year, because there will be plenty of people who want to have coffee with you at Parliament to talk about their particular issue. Most of them are PR companies, most of them are lobbyists, and they’re not going to be in service of my constituents.

So it’s about weeding out the meeting requests that are never going to help my constituency, from those discussions and those conversations that will help to put more police on the beat, will bring NHS waiting lists down, will help to grow our economy locally, make sure we’ve got good, well-paying jobs, that people are not living in substandard rented accommodation, that people can get on the housing ladder…

There’s so much to put right, the same laser focus is absolutely critical. And so for me, over the course of the first year, it’s been about becoming really quite rigorous with how we spend our time, because the next four years are going to fly by, and we need to be able to show to the people that I represent that the trust and the faith they put in us, to elect Labor for the first time in Bournemouth, is being repaid.

That after 14 years of feeling so let down and seeing services hollowed out, and our town, frankly, in decline, that things are starting to feel better. And that’s particularly important, because I feel like we’re at a particular moment in our country’s history where people feel less faith and confidence in the ability of politics to get things done, and we have to restore that faith.

Luke: A topic you’ve been campaigning on concerns playgrounds and play areas. Why are you drawn to this issue?

Tom: I’m drawn to the issue, not just because it’s about making sure that children have opportunities to play on their doorstep. I mean, how ridiculous is it that we’re in a situation where, because of the underfunding of councils, you’ve got councils allowing playgrounds to go to wrack and ruin or closing them, which means that children have nowhere to go to safely play. How have we become that kind of a society? That’s just fundamentally wrong.

It’s not just that. It’s wrong for people right now to be losing out on those play opportunities. It’s actually really unfair that previous generations, including my own, could play in all those playgrounds, but today’s generation can’t. It’s just absolutely wrong.

So we held the first parliamentary debate on playgrounds in seven years, earlier this year in January, and it’s the longest in 17 years. And the last playgrounds debate of that length was when there was an announcement of the first national play strategy by the last Laboor government. So, the fact that politicians haven’t been talk about playgrounds explains a lot about why we’ve seen them run down. And for me, it’s not just about the injustice inter-generationally or the injustice that particularly affects younger people today. It’s actually saying a lot about what we value in our society, because play so important for developing children’s ability to make friendships, for parents to sit on benches beside each other, at first strangers, but getting to know each other, sharing parenting tips but then becoming friends, and those friendships lasting for decades. As a society, the playground is a place where so much of our community can happen. And I think that by closing those playgrounds, we send the signal that community matters less, and we’ve taken away opportunities for communities to build.

And if I can do anything as an MP in Bournemouth East in the next four years, that makes such a big difference to building community, giving children opportunities to thrive and also makes our communities look better, it will be about introducing more play equipment into our playgrounds around our town.