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jgale | 
13 August 2010 at 10:11 | 113 views
Congratulations to Yeovil Town FC on their first win of the season, in their first match on Saturday 7th August. It is always good to have the first points on the board, and three points is better still. Best wishes to all the management, players and wider team at Huish Park for the season to come. We have been doing very well to compete in League One, when so many of the other teams have much bigger crowds and much bigger budgets with which to attract players. We cannot just sit back and expect success to fall into our laps – we are having to be smarter and sharper to offset the disadvantages of being one of the smaller clubs in the League.
Last week Parliament wasn’t sitting, and that gave me a chance to catch up on local issues and to hold a variety of meetings – including with Rupert Cox of the Somerset Chamber of Commerce.
I also held two Advice Centres – one in Yeovil on Thursday 5th August and one in Chard on the morning of Friday 6th August. Both Advice Centres were very busy, and as usual there were a lot of people who wanted to see me about housing and tax credits – which have probably been the two biggest issues in my Advice Centres for every one of the last 9 years!
Housing is an interesting issue, and it is a very high priority for millions of people across the country, yet it rarely seems to get much attention at a national level – in Westminster and elsewhere. There are, I think, a number of reasons for this – including the complexity of some of the policy issues concerned, and the fact that Britain has a very split attitude to housing issues.
On the one hand, there are many property owners in Britain, and they often see rising house prices as a “good thing”. This view is encouraged by most of the media, which presents higher house prices as good news, and falling house prices as bad news. This may not be how things feel for those people trying to get on the first rung of the property ladder!
In addition, those people who are already housed often give high priority to keeping green space “green”. I am often struck by how often people in brand new houses on the edge of towns will complain about plans for additional housing development near them, forgetting that their houses were also once regarded by others near by as representing an undesirable “blight” on the landscape.
Our planning laws in Britain are very restrictive compared with many countries, and new development is often limited to just a few sites – this makes land expensive, and it often snares new housing up in long delays. The result is that new housing building, not least new social house building, often falls way behind the levels necessary just to keep pace with demand. And demand is rising not just because of rising population but because the average household size is falling – so we need more houses for a given size of population.
Recently David Cameron and his housing minister, Grant Shapps, have been talking about ways of getting better value from existing social housing. Sometimes subsidized social housing is being used by people, they point out, on higher incomes – who arguably should not need social housing. And sometimes social housing is seriously “under-occupied” – as children move out, you can find situations where one or two adults are taking up a scarce four bedroom house.
These issues do need looking at, but the answers are not easy. If we take social housing away from those who get decent jobs, we are creating unbalanced communities and giving a big disincentive to people to find work (something which the Department of Work and Pensions is trying to address). And even where homes are under-occupied, it can be very difficult to insist on taking back a home which someone may have lived in for 40 or 50 years, and in which they may have invested time, money and a lot of emotional commitment.
One good idea, however, is to enable people to move more easily around the country, with a national data-base for switching social rented homes. That is long overdue, and uncontroversial.
David.
jgale | 29 July 2010 at 08:58 | 208 views
Parliament has now finished for its summer recess. But this year there will be no repeat of the past lengthy “holiday”, which saw Parliament shut down until mid October.
Instead, MPs will return on 6th September, and the parliamentary business agenda is already bursting full with debates and new legislation.
On the very first day back, MPs will debate the new plans to cut the number of MPs and to hold a referendum on a new “Alternative Vote” electoral system. The reduction in the number of MPs will require a “Boundary Review” which will cut out about 60 MPs in areas where the population of the constituency is below the average number for the country as a whole.
Somerset is actually one of the few areas which could end up with an extra MP, as our seats have some of the largest populations of voters in the whole of the United Kingdom. Frankly, it would seem odd to be adding any new constituencies when we are trying to cut numbers, and I would favour Somerset keeping the existing 5 parliamentary seats. But this might need a little more “tolerance” of variance from the “average” seat. We shall see.
There will also be a debate in September on the deployment of UK Armed Forces in Afghanistan. I am pleased that there has recently been more talk from Ministers over the timetable for bringing our troops back from Afghanistan. We have already been in that country for a very long time, and the list of dead and wounded rises every week. It is now clear that we cannot expect to achieve every possible ambition in Afghanistan. Our aim must be to leave a country which has its own army and police force to ensure order, and where there is no safe haven for the Al Qaeda terrorists to re-establish themselves.
What all this could mean is UK force levels peaking in 2010, with a gradual reduction of our commitment from mid 2011 onwards, as the US troop surge is gradually unwound. The aim would then be to train the Afghan army and police (which will still take some time) so that withdrawal can be completed by around 2014-2015. No one can call that a rushed timetable, and many people will want to see a faster pace of troop reduction.
We also now know the business of the House of Commons for mid September. There will be a debate on the Government’s new plan to introduce Fixed Term Parliaments. This will mean General Elections being held on a regular, predictable, cycle in the same way that elections for councils and the devolved parliaments are. No longer will the Prime Minister have the chance to select the date of the next General Election based simply on a calculation of when he or she is most likely to wrong-foot his political opponents.
There will also, on 14th September, be an important debate on the Equitable Life Payments Bill. This will seek to frame the terms of the compensation for those who lost money in the badly regulated Equitable Life. The previous government did nothing to resolve this problem for years, but the Coalition Government is now trying to find a solution. The issue will be how much compensation to pay, not least as the Government currently has very little money to spend in any area!
This is an issue which affects quite a lot of people in our area, and I have already had many letters on the subject.
Last week I held three Advice Centres in our area – one was in Yeovil on Friday, and then there were two on Saturday, the first in Ilminster and the second in Crewkerne. The Ilminster and Crewkerne surgeries were both surprisingly busy, as we do not have a booking system for those two venues. It is therefore impossible to guess how many people will turn up. But I started in Ilminster at about 8.55am and we did not finish in Crewkerne until about 1.15pm.
Finally, I am grateful to many people for continuing kind words of encouragement, either in person or by card, letter or e-mail. This has meant a great deal to me.
Ever,
David.
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