I am Abdul Mateen Riaz and I was elected as the Member of Youth Parliament for Redbridge in early February 2022. My fellow peers elected me to become the MYP and represent Redbridge. 12,357 young people voted in the Redbridge Youth Election, from 28 schools and organisations, which is an amazing performance and is 38% of the young people in Redbridge aged 11-18 years old. The school with the highest turnout for was Loxford School with 1,255 ballots and the school with the highest percentage turnout was Ilford County High School with 98% of the pupils voting. I am honoured to be the MYP, and I am hopefully making Redbridge a better place for everyone. The role of the MYP has given me the platform to further the topics I feel strongly about which I have written in my manifesto.

My 3 Manifesto Points were:

1) I aim to raise awareness and provide information about help and support with homelessness 

I would like to achieve is to educate young people on homelessness through workshops and assemblies. According to multiple reports, many children in Redbridge are without a permanent home. School children who have these housing and financial issues have a disadvantage, therefore, to give them an equal opportunity schools in Redbridge, I will raise awareness and campaign for them to be provided with stationary, textbooks and any other necessary resources.  

2)I aim to arrange career choice workshops as well as promoting work shadowing 

The second thing I would like to achieve is arranging career choices workshops and to work with local businesses to offer more opportunities for work shadowing, this will be beneficial as you can watch somebody do their job and then be able to see what it is like. The career choices workshops will allow students to have a greater understanding about a certain job. 

3)Educate and help people about knife crime and campaign for more extra-curricular activities 

The final thing I would like to achieve is to educate and help young people about knife crime and offer more extra-curricular activities. To make Redbridge a safer place to live, we must end knife crime. I will educate the youth about knife crime and provide information on what to do if they are faced with it. I will campaign for more extra-curricular activities, so students will be able to occupy themselves in other activities. 

You can view this on the website: https//www.redbridge.gov.uk/young-people/redbridge-youth-council/

I have been the MYP for nearly 9 months now and I have just had my House of Commons Sitting on 4th November 2022. I took part in the House of Commons Sitting and I, very fortunately, had the chance to speak. I will be writing about this in my next newspaper in more detail so watch this space!