Climate change and our environment hasn't featured at all in the media coverage of the campaign so far, but for me it's of paramount importance.

We have the Rampion Windfarm being built just off our shore. Once it's up and running it'll provide enough electricity for 300,000 households, that's enough to power our whole city and much more on top.
It was only possible to build this because of the Green Investment Bank which provided £250m of funding to get the project off the ground.

It's so important to me that we move towards more renewable power generation and the Green Investment Bank has been a real success, so before the election was called I travelled to Edinburgh to meet with the CEO to find out in detail how more projects like this can become a reality.

Even though we're a city that consumes a lot of power I'm desperately keen we do our bit. So I've visited EDF in Hove where they spent £700m on renewable technology to understand how our homes can not only consume electricity but to generate it too. Solar and heat exchange technology is becoming a reality, but I've learned that the holy-grail is battery innovation so that power can be stored and used at peak times which is often in the evening when solar isn't always possible.

Huge advances are being made, but government must be an active partner. I'm worried because the Tories have sold off the Green Investment Bank to Macquarie for £2.3bn, an Australian bank with a reputation for asset-stripping. The work of the bank so far has been amazing and I want to continue to champion its work and make sure that as we move forward I'm keeping a close eye on its work to ensure it remains focused on getting big projects and technology off the ground to ensure future generations have cleaner air and a healthy environment.

When Labour were in office we passed the Climate Change Act, the first of its kind, and carbon emissions fell by 20%. We need this same sense of ambition again and seeing as though Theresa May shut down the Department For Climate Change altogether it's another reason why you need a powerful voice like mine otherwise our country will go int he wrong direction and not carry on with this great work.

I took the time to travel to Scotland to understand better how to make things happen for our environment, and it's an issue I will never let fall from our national agenda as the Brexit negotiations unfolds.

Today the Jo Cox Foundation asked every candidate to lay campaigning aside for an hour and spend time with a community group. So I left my teams this afternoon and joined the Coptic community for a while after their Sunday worship. I spent time listening about how important inter-generational activities are and it was amazing to see so many generations all enjoying time together.

Tonight I'm going to be in touch with some other MP's who were friends of Jo's and we're going to share stories from our visits. We all think it's a lovely way to honour Jo and also to keep us focused on what really matters even in the middle of a tense election campaign.

Something quite amazing happened from when I was selected as the Labour candidate in 2013 right through to the election in 2015 ... I wasn’t asked about being gay once.  I think that’s amazing because it shows that our society is focusing more on who we are and what we can achieve in life than things like sexuality. The normalisation of being gay is far more radical than people think, and it’s making life for young people who are unsure of their sexuality far easier than in times gone by.

But things are far from ideal because homophobic and transphobic hate crime is still very high, even in our city. And what is happening abroad in places like Chechnya is incomprehensible in its inhumanity. The president said recently that gay people care not being murdered by the state because they have no gay people and if they did it would be the family killing them, not the state. The values we hold dear here must be asserted in our relationships abroad through the UN and right through to our trading relationships.
Here at home we must not take our advances in equality for granted. We must show that gay marriage is no longer a separate thing, it’s now simply ‘marriage’. We should celebrate and defend these achievements because there are some who would love to turn the clock back.

Today LGBT Labour came to join me on the doorsteps. They exist to promote diversity in our politics and ensure we have a good representation in elected office from town halls to parliament and I’m a very keen supporter of their work.

The first day I went to parliament after the last election I did a BBC interview and they asked me what it was like being the first openly gay MP in Brighton and Hove. I was flawed by the question and didn’t know how to answer it because I’d never been asked about it. After the interview wet out I got a message from a youngster saying that he’d followed my career closely and only just found out that I was gay. He said that he was going to tell his parents that night that he was gay too because now he knew that people would see him for what he’s achieved and capable of first, and sexuality second, third, or not even at all, that he felt much more confident about opening up. I don’t talk about this kind of thing often, but in the week where over a hundred countries come together to stand against hate crime it seems appropriate.

You can read Labour's LGBT Election Pledges here.