In a fitting tribute to our armed forces, I was delighted to hear this week that, following many years of campaigning by service charities, Michael Fallon, the Secretary of State for Defence, announced that widows, widowers and surviving civil partners of all members of the Armed Forces Pension Scheme will now retain their pensions for life, even if they remarry.

This recognises the unique commitment made by service families, who have often had to cope with long and uncertain separations while the mobile nature of service family life prevented many earning their own occupational pension.

The unfair pension anomaly often prevented service widows (and widowers and civil partners) from marrying again without huge financial sacrifice and I am so pleased that the Defence Secretary saw the injustice and finally rectified the situation.

This week I am taking advantage of a three-day Parliamentary Recess to get on with a number of local meetings and events. So far I have visited the NHS Treatment Centre in Devizes, where I met representatives from the NHS Wiltshire Clinical Commissioning Group and local GPs to review the ongoing work to provide more primary health service provision in Devizes, and the plans to deal with the pressures and challenges that our GP surgeries face.

Improving local healthcare provision is one of my local campaigning priorities and I will remain fully involved in these plans as they move forward. I also visited Devizes School to talk politics with sixth formers and to officially open a solar panel installation which has been developed by Kennet Community Energy Limited and installed by another local company, IDDEA Limited, based in Devizes.

I also fitted in one of my supermarket surgeries, this time in Morrisons in Devizes. I do move around the constituency with these but please don’t feel that you have to wait to catch me by the checkouts as I also have regular ‘appointment only’ surgeries. If I can help you with anything then please do call my local office on 01380 729358 or email claire.perry.mp @parliament.uk.

You may also be interested to know that I am on Facebook as Claire Perry MP, on Twitter as claire4devizes and send out a monthly e-newsletter which you can sign up to from my website www.claireperry.org.uk