It is good to see Siobhan Baillie acknowledging in her SNJ column the work done by Stonehouse Town Council and local campaigners over many years to get the Bristol Road station reopened.

However, she conveniently fails to give credit for the support and work of Stroud District Council, which submitted the Restoring Your Railways bid - written by Stonehouse Town Council - nearly 18 months ago, yet has still not received a decision as to whether the bid can be carried forward to the next stage of an Outline Business Case.

Her article also doesn't address any of the points I made in this newspaper last month (https://www.stroudnewsandjournal.co.uk/news/24083833.taking-long-reopen-stonehouse-railway-station/) - chiefly that the decision was supposed to have been made last year. So the promised visit by the rail minister – mentioned as though this were an achievement in itself, is just evidence of further delay. The Minister's wording in Parliament was about "discussing the bid" - discussing is not deciding.

The local residents and councils that have campaigned for so long to get this vital transport link reopened will, of course, be delighted if Ms Baillie can get the rail minister to finally make a decision. But the claim that she has “turned this around” is absolute nonsense. It rather brings to mind the time she claimed to have “created” a Nature GCSE, a claim she later had to apologise for.

Interestingly, Ms Baillie does concede that Bristol Road station was closed as a result of the Beeching cuts (which were the outcome of a report commissioned by the Conservative government of the day). But she fails to mention that the Tory-controlled Gloucestershire County Council has repeatedly refused to support the campaign.

She criticises previous Stroud MPs for failing to make progress on this campaign. So let’s hope she can break that record of failure by persuading her government to stop ignoring the business case for reopening the station.

Pete Kennedy, Green Party parliamentary candidate for Stroud constituency