MPs look back on their first year in Parliament

If a week is a long time in politics, what does that make a year?

Last July 4, voters elected 15 new MPs for Bedfordshire, Hertfordshire and Buckinghamshire, but how have they got on since?

The BBC has spoken to three of them to find out.

David Taylor won the Hemel Hempstead seat from the Conservatives to become its first Labour MP since 2005.

A year on he said it had been "the absolute privilege of my life" to represent an area where his grandparents had moved to after World War Two.

He said it had been "really difficult" as a first-time MP as "you have the party machine behind you, but when you get elected you are on your own".

He told the BBC one of the highlights of his first year had been a visit to Ukraine in March to deliver supplies and equipment and meet ministers and soldiers.

As well as making concessions to the welfare bill, the government made a U-turn on winter fuel payments, but Taylor insisted his party was "heading in the right direction".

He said he was "having to accept that politics was much more volatile than it had ever been" but added he thought "we had ended up with a better bill" as a result.

He said the economy "was heading in the right direction and NHS waiting lists were coming down" but that Labour were "under a huge amount of pressure in terms of the broken country we had inherited from the Conservatives".

Lewis Cocking retained Broxbourne for the Conservatives having replaced Sir Charles Walker after 19 years.

Cocking said being an MP was "a bit like having two different jobs" as "you were in a Westminster bubble" in Parliament, but it was "completely different speaking to people on the streets and in surgeries".

One of his election priorities had been to get more banking hubs in his constituency and he told the BBC he had put that request to Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner at Prime Minister's Questions in November.

He said he "didn't really have a worst moment" since being elected, but admitted it was "long hours and hard work". He added: "I chose to do it and am really privileged to be able to do it and want to give 110% every day."

Having lost power after 14 years, Cocking admitted the Conservatives had "come from a very bad place" where voters "told us loud and clear they did not want us in office any more".

However, he said that "lots of people contact me now and say this is not the change they wanted".

He added the party were now "looking at where it went wrong and what policies to implement to win back the trust of the British people".

Victoria Collins won the Harpenden and Berkhamsted seat for the Liberal Democrats and described it as "a mad journey" since, as she dealt with the challenge of representing a brand new constituency.

She said there was "a lot of work to do to build infrastructure to run the seat and find out what kind of MP I wanted to be".

An election pledge for Collins had been to "stop sewage dumping in precious chalk streams and rivers" and she said "on the first day in Parliament that she had written to Thames Water about the Markyate sewage works" and added she had "not stopped campaigning on that".

She admitted that "quite frankly we are still not where we want to be" and said that in March she wrote to the Environment Agency again but had not got a response.

However she told the BBC a month later she had raised the issue in Parliament and "very shortly after" received a reply from the agency.

She felt the last year had proven the Lib Dems were "being a real constructive opposition, whether it was pushing on social care, or holding the government to account on its international stance on defence".

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