My buddy Sue Jones, who has died of most cancers aged 67, did monumental good for the folks of Harlow in Essex as a welfare rights adviser. Though she was not from Harlow initially, over a interval of 40 years she got here to imbue the city’s spirit, and have become a champion for it.
Sue arrived there within the mid-Eighties to work as a advantages and employment adviser within the Welfare Rights and Recommendation Service, which on the time was run by the native council. She ultimately rose to be the service’s chief govt when it floated away from native authority management.
I labored with Sue after I turned a neighborhood councillor after which after I was elected as Harlow’s MP. In each roles I noticed at first-hand her immense abilities and dogged advocacy for folks in want. She was an knowledgeable at marshalling information and proof, had a consummate data of laws, and was like a canine with a bone when it got here to preventing for her shoppers, her employees, or towards injustice of any kind.
Sue was born in Liverpool, to Dorothy (nee Haisley), a nursing assistant, and Alec Jones, a shopkeeper. She went to Deyes highschool in Liverpool, after which she labored as a clerk at Liverpool metropolis council, the North West Water Authority and the Division of Well being and Social Safety within the late 70s whereas finding out for A-levels at evening college.
From 1980 to 1983 she did a level in financial social historical past at Hull College as a mature pupil, earlier than changing into a advantages and employment rights adviser with Harlow council.
In later years, when cuts started to hit exhausting, Sue lobbied for extra money and mounted authorized challenges, till, in 2013, she reconstituted the service as a charitable physique, the Harlow and West Essex Legislation Centre (often known as the Harlow Recommendation Centre) and have become its chief govt. This opened the way in which for profitable bids for different sources of funding that secured its future.
Though work was Sue’s primary curiosity, she seemed ahead to her occasional journeys to Australia, the US and Cornwall, and cherished visiting members of the family. She was a caring and gifted group champion who made an enormous distinction to many individuals’s lives in Harlow.
She met Frank O’Brien, an audio-visual technician, shortly after she had moved to Harlow, and so they had been companions for a few years earlier than marrying in 2010. Frank died in 2017 and he or she is survived by his youngsters and grandchildren from a earlier marriage.
