At the start of the year a copy of my Westminster Report newsletter should have landed on your doorstep. The Report outlines some of the ‘highlights’ of my work in the constituency over the preceding six months and, as one constituent told me, contains far too many pictures of myself. Harrumph!

I would like to extend my deepest thanks (and sympathy) to the hard working Posties who delivered them. In all, they hand-delivered 36,400 newsletters over a number of cold January mornings, and I wouldn’t really have blamed them if they put them on the fire instead. But deliver them they did. It’s quite hard for me to tell how many copies actually get read; but even if, heaven forbid, you picked it up only to throw it in the recycling bin, you will hopefully have seen the headline: ‘PLEASE SHOP LOCALLY!’

With the recession taking hold local, independent, shops are starting to disappear from our highstreets. The Federation of Small Businesses, for example, reports that we are losing 2,000 of these shops each year. The result being that we inch ever closer to ‘indentikit Britain’.

As elsewhere, Caterham’s local shops are so much more than just places to buy stuff. They give the town its distinct character; they are the heart of the community, and in these progressively challenging times we must do all we can to keep that heart beating.

But as well as supporting local businesses for ‘abstract’ reasons, we need also to support them for very real reasons. Let us not forget that these businesses are vital employers of local people: for every business that disappears, a great number of families are affected.

I recently attended the launch of a fantastic new grassroots campaign in Caterham called ‘Shop Smart, Shop Local’, which was attended by a number of local business owners. It was a fantastic opportunity not only for me to hear how businesses are coping with the recession on the ground, but also for businesses to share ideas amongst each other on how best to beat the downturn.

I was struck by the level of resilience, positivity and initiative on show with shops, for example, looking at ways of jointly introducing loyalty cards and prize draws to reward those that choose to shop locally and support the local community. Rather than accepting a loss of revenue or, worse, closure as an almost inevitable consequence of the economic climate we are living in, businesses are fighting back. It now falls to us to support them.

Further information on the campaign can be found online at www.shoplocalcaterham.co.uk/.