Lloyds Group job losses – Minister’s reply (2)

Those of you who have been following my actions since the devastating Lloyds Group job losses announced last year, will know that I wrote to the Minister on 25^th February in response to his letter of 15^th December to highlight a number of specific measures that could help Aylesbury in the same way that other parts of the country have been assisted by the Government.

I am afraid that the Minister’s reply is not good news, and I am again desperately disappointed by his letter. As you can see, he dismisses my comparison with Redcar where the Government put together a £60 million emergency package to help deal with the consequences of the Corus job losses on Teesside. Instead the Minister highlights a number of measures which were happening anyway.

Below I have included the Minister’s reply.

Debate on Britain’s Security and Intelligence Services

Last Thursday saw the annual debate in Parliament on the report of the Intelligence and Security Committee which oversees the work of MI5, MI6 and GCHQ.  I wound up the debate for the Opposition which meant that I was on the bench for the full duration.

The ISC isn’t like a normal Select Committee that shadows a government department. Because of the sensitivity of its brief, it holds all its meetings in private and  reports to the Prime Minister rather than directly to Parliament. 

It is not easy to get the balance right between the competing needs for secrecy and for accountability.  Until 20 years ago, British governments did not even admit to the existence of the security and intelligence services. It was actually the Thatcher government that first took action to lift the curtain a bit and place the services on a statutory footing and the Major government that first set up the ISC.

The argument about how to ensure the accountability in a free society of agencies that of there nature must remain secret was a theme of the debate with the ISC chairman Kim Howells MP (Labour, Pontypridd) vehemently asserting the independence of his committee and expressing some pretty trenchant criticisms of how elements of the government machine had tried to lean on the committee and its staff. It would be a very foolish man or woman who tried to lean on Kim!

You can read the Hansard report here.

Stokenchurch meeting and reflections on our planning system

I was in Stokenchurch on Friday afternoon to attend a public meeting called by Stokenchurch Parish Council to discuss plans by Wycombe District Council to locate two additional travellers’ sites in the village.  Longburrow Hall was packed.  I reckon that well over a hundred people were there, many of whom had taken time off work to be present.

It was clear that the overwhelming majority of people at the meeting had no animus against the long established gypsy and traveller families who already live in Stokenchurch.  What they fear was that the designation of the two sites, both of which are in the Chilterns Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty and one of which is also in green belt land, and would open the way for significant numbers of outsiders with no previous connection to the local community.  People are understandably upset when their own planning applications for modest extensions or even for garden buildings have been turned down on the grounds that green belt must be protected but then find out is that an exception is being made to the rules when it comes to travellers’ sites.  Similarly, my judgement is that people are very willing to accept that their local district council must plan for the future housing needs of gypsies and travellers with connections to the Wycombe area, just as they need to plan for the needs of everybody else.  What irks is the fact that the proposals now on the table have been prompted not by the  local council’s own assessment of what is needed but by the need to meet a central government target. The government has not only made an assessment of Wycombe’s needs but then added an extra element to represent what it considers to be Wycombe’s share of the “regional” needs of South East England as a whole.

As I reflected on what was said at this meeting, it seemed to me that the implications of the debate went a lot wider than this particular argument about travellers’ sites. People don’t feel that they have ownership of the planning system and yet the planning system is supposed to operate to give local people a real say in striking a balance between development and conservation in the places where they live.  I am convinced that the planning system, like so much else in our society, has become far too centralised.  I think that governments of both parties have been guilty but there is no doubt that centralisation has accelerated during the last dozen years.

We need a different approach.  A good start would be to scrap altogether the cumbersome, remote and undemocratic tier of regional planning and return housing and planning powers to elected local authorities.  We should then aim to put in place a bottom-up system of planning in which district councils have to consult with people at parish and neighbourhood level.  The final local plan should represent the aspirations of local people.  It should be a policy in the framing of which local residents feel that they have been allowed a genuine say.

Of course there will be national infrastructure projects where it will have to be Parliament, rather than a host of different local authorities, which takes responsibility for the decision. But such cases are rare. We need to reform our planning system to make it much more responsive to local opinion and local need.

High Speed 2 (Buckinghamshire) Debate

Please find a link to both the Hansard and a video of my High Speed 2 debate on 23rd March 2010.

Hansard: High Speed 2 (Buckinghamshire) Debate

Video: High Speed 2 (Buckinghamshire) Debate

HS2 – Parliamentary Questions

Below are the answers that I received from the Minister regarding the Parliamentary Questions that I tabled about High Speed Rail. As you can see, one of the questions has not been answered yet but it does say the Minister will get back to me shortly. Sometimes this can take a couple of days but on other occasions it can be a few weeks. I will nevertheless post the response on my website as soon as I have received it.

HS2 Debate

I have been lucky in the ballot and have secured a 30 minute debate in Westminster Hall between 1.00 and 1.30 pm next Tuesday 23 March on the subject of The Impact on Buckinghamshire of the Government’s Preferred Route for High Speed Two.

If anyone is planning to be in London then, there are a limited number of public seats for debates in Westminster Hall.

Communion and choir

A spiritual experience at either end of the day. I don’t always get to the monthly communion service at St Margaret’s, the “church of Parliament” next door to Westminster Abbey but I’m always glad when I do.  The service is said according to the 1662 Book of Common Prayer. Although the language is old and sometimes sounds dated, it was written to be read alopud. You can hear the music in its cadences and I think that no-one has yet come up with a more beautiful or inspiring liturgy.

Afterwards we have breakfast together in the Speaker’s State Apartments and listen to a speaker for about 10 minutes. It is a cross-party occasion amnd involves both MPs and Peers. Today the speaker was Sir Patrick Cormack MP (South Staffordshire) one of the founders of the Communion/breakfast gathering. Patrick has served in Parliament since 1970 and is retiring at this coming election, so in a kind of farewell address he reflected on the place of Christianity in parliament and on the importance of politicians of differing views respecting each other’s integrity and opinions. His advice to the new MPs who will be elected in May was pretty good: ” Never believe that any single political party has a monopoly of wisdom”.

This evening I took part in the Parliament Choir’s 10th anniversary concert in the splendid surroundings of Westminster Hall. The choir is not just a cross-party institution (I normally find myself in the tenor row next to Alan Beith (Lib Dem) and Alun Michael (Labour)) but brings togther members of both Houses, police officers, doorkeepers, catering staff, secretaries, clerks, even a journalist or two – the entire Westminster village.

This evening’s programme was Mozart’s Requiem, a piece that I have adored since I first sang it at school when I was seventeen, and a new setting by our accompanist Nick O’Neill of the prayer used at the beginning of each parliamentary day: Of All Persons and Estates.

The audience seemed to enjoy it all but since it is due to be broadcast on Classic FM tomorrow evening (John Brunning’s programme, starting at 9pm), you will be able to judge for yourself.

Banning cluster munitions

After yesterday’s conference on nuclear policy and with the surge of constituency work on HS2 that has come on top of the normal postbag and mailbox, I was behind on my preparation for today’s debate. so I got into the office at 6.30 am to put in some time before breakfast.

The Cluster Munitions Prohibition Bill is not a controversial measure. All three main parties support it and at the end of the afternoon’s debate we agreed the Second Reading without a vote. But even when there’s not a party political row, I always feel nervous when getting ready for an appearance at the Despatch Box.

I hate speaking from a text – it makes you sound wooden – so I took the briefing material that my researcher had put together, read the Bill, thought about it, diod some googling around the subject and then sat down and drafted then redreafted some notes to use. In Opposition, you are never going to know as much as the Minister about the subject. He or she has got (quite properly) the expert advice of the civil service available; we don’t get that. The Opposition Foreign affairs team has four researchers to help us with everything.  For the Opposition spokesman, the task is to show understanding of the subject, to be able to ask the Minister some pertinent questions and (if the matter is controversial) to be able to suggest a better policy to follow.

Banning cluster munitions does mean that our soldiers have to do without a type of weapon that up to now they have had available. Part of the justification for the ban is that to use cluster weapons, which produce unexploded bomblets that have killed and maimed thousands of innocent civilians around the world, is so morally wrong that we should accept the loss of military capability that a ban involves. The other reason is that cluster weapons are primarily intended to be used against a large scale attack by enemy tanks or other vehicles, that there were therefore good reasons to have them when the threat was of Warsaw Pact tanks striking into western Europe but that now the threat has changed.  I spent a bit of time today probing how the government came to make that judgement and trying to find out whether the army regarded the loss to its capability as insignificant or more serious. The Minister was reluctant to give too many details, though he did tell me that the Chief of the Defence Staff was content with the new policy.

If you want to read the Hansard report, click here.

HS2 – Letter from Lord Adonis

Below is the letter that I received from the Transport Secretary about HS2.

I note that although the Government has taken a decision on a preferred route through the A413 corridor, Lord Adonis does concede that the final decision “on either the strategic case for high speed rail or the specific routes any line may follow” will not be taken until after the consultation, which is due to be carried out in the autumn.

Nuclear proliferation

This morning I spoke at the Royal Society headquarters in London about the enormous political challenge posed by nuclear proliferation.  With me on the panel were Des Browne, former Secretary of State for Defence, and Baroness Shirley Williams, former Cabinet Minister and now adviser to the Prime Minister on proliferation issues. The session was chaired by Lord (Martin) Rees, President of the Royal Society, Astronomer Royal and Professor of Cosmology and Astrophysics at Cambridge. add to that an audience of senior scientists and nuclear policy experts and you can see why I found the meeting a bit daunting in prospect.

The conference had been organised by the Royal Society to mark the publication of its paper on what scientists can do to help address the challenge of nuclear proliferation. You can read that paper here.

I’d been asked to speak on how a Conservative government would address the isues of nuclear proliferation and multi-lateral disarmament. What’s encouraging is that there is now a great deal of cross-party agreement on these issues. There was little with which I disagreed in what either Des or Shirley said.

You can access my speech here: Nuclear Proliferation Speech at the Royal Society