In this week's community column, Maurice Corry, Conservative MSP for the West of Scotland, says police ranks should be boosted by service personnel nearing the end of their service careers

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As many of you will have seen over the past week, I have been working hard to push for service personnel who are nearing the end of their service careers to be retrained for civilian life, and use the skills they have amassed throughout their service to help continue to serve the country by working with the police service.

This would help address the difficulty some service personnel have in finding suitable work when leaving the forces, provide a purpose and focus to help prevent possible mental health issues, and would put well trained individuals on the front line of civilian duties to assist the police force.

We need to constantly look at developing job opportunities to suit modern life and do what we can to ensure there are adequate options for people from all walks of life. I have been supporting the idea of the creation of an Innovation Hub in Helensburgh to bring people together to encourage, create and improve job opportunities within and around Helensburgh.

This being the Year of Young People, we need to ensure sufficient opportunities are created for the younger generation. We also have a great number of highly trained, experienced people retiring from the forces and a lack of opportunities for these skills to be utilised.

There simply isn’t enough effort going into these areas currently and by creating an Innovation Hub we can pull together these two vastly important groups of people to encourage ideas and connections, which in turn will create new business and innovation within the town.

Helensburgh and Lomond has a huge amount to offer people, but we have to ensure it caters for everyone and their families adequately, the more growth we can encourage, the knock on effect throughout the town will be to everyone’s benefit.

I welcome anyone who is interested in this project, job creation or to further, or add ideas on how we can improve opportunities within the area to contact me at maurice.corry.msp@parliament.scot