SLOUGH MP Fiona Mactaggart has said it is only fair to pass on the reigns to someone new – after confirming she would stand down as the town’s representative at the forthcoming election on Thursday.

Miss Mactaggart, 63, told the Observer that she would probably have stood down in 2020 – had a snap election not been called by Prime Minister Theresa May this week.

The election will take place on June 8 and Miss Mactaggart confirmed yesterday that she would not stand again.

She said: “I’m 63 and it is time to move on and give someone else a chance to do this fantastic, wonderful job.

“In 2020 I would be a pensioner and so I don’t think people should hang on into their dotage in Parliament – I think it is wrong. It is important to have older and younger people in Parliament and one of the ways you get that is to pass on the torch.”

In a letter to the Slough Labour party members, Miss Mactaggart said she had ‘been bored by political squabbles over personalities’ and doesn’t now have ‘the passion which has driven my politics for 20 years’.

However she said she was leaving the town in a better state than when she was elected back in 1997 – the same year Mrs May was elected to Parliament.

She pointed to the number of Slough’s jobseekers halving by more than 1,000 since 1997, the town now being one of the top-ten places for GCSEs in the country, and crime falling to lower levels than in Reading and Oxford.

She said: “I’ll know I’ll miss it and I didn’t want this to happen so fast.”

Miss Mactaggart told the Observer that education remained the most important issue for the town’s next MP, with government cuts taking their toll and schools struggling to recruit teachers.

In the letter she added: “Some big challenges remain: the western rail link to Heathrow is not yet built, the quality of our housing stock has been massively improved but there is still too little housing that working people in the town can afford.”

Although she was proud of her record, she said ‘it has been harder’ to land results in the last five to six years of opposition government.